-V ^ 







LAJ1& 






BE3 





Clc 



Book -. ... — = — < — ■— 



V 




,yv 



ESSENTIALS 



ASD 



NON-ESSENTIALS IN RELIGION 



"Res ipsa qiise nunc religio Christiana nuncupatur, erat 
apud antiques, nee unquam defuit, ab initio, genere humano, 
quousque Cliristus venisset in earn em, unde vera religio qiue 
jam erat, ccepit appellari Christiana." 

St. Augustine. Retract. I: 13. 



AND 



Essentials 

( 

Non-Essentials in Religion 



SIX IECTURES 

DELIVERED IN THE MUSIC HALL, BOSTON, 
BY 

JAMES FREEMAN CLARKE, 

AUTHOR OF "ORTHODOXY: ITS TRUTHS AND ERRORS," " STEPS OF 
BELIEF," "TEN GREAT RELIGIONS," "CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE 



BOSTON: 
AMERICAN UNITARIAN ASSOCIATION, 

7 Tremont Place. 
1878. 



C .la U 



> 



Copyright by 
American Unitarian Association. 

1877. 



Ca?7ibridg'e : 



Press of John Wilson and Son. 



*y? '* 



& 



/ 



These Six Lectures were delivered in the Music 
Hall, in JBoston, this winter (1877), at the re- 
quest of the American Unitarian Association / 
and, as they seem to have met the needs of many 
minds, are now published as they were delivered, 

with scarcely any alterations. 

J. F. a 
Boston, Dec. 1*4, 1877. 



CONTENTS. 



i. 

PAGE 

Faith and Belief. Essential Belief 

CONCERNING GOD 1 



II. 

Christ and Christianity 33 

III. 
The Bible 57 

IV. 
The Church and Worship' 81 

V. 
Christian Experience 103 

YI. 
The Future Life 127 



ESSENTIA 



AND 




NON-ESSENTIALS IN RELIGION. 



I. 



v*> 



THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN FAITH 
AND BELIEF. 

PROPOSE to speak of essentials and non- 
-*■ essentials in religion. My purpose is, not 
to defend a creed or a sect, but to point out that 
common ground of essential religion on which 
all good men can stand side by side. For it is 
mostly about non-essentials that men differ: on 
what is most vital or important, they usually 
agree. If, therefore, I can show the essential 
unity of faith, or life, which underlies all seeming 
opposition and contradiction of sects or creeds, I 
shall do a more important work than by making 
the most triumphant argument in favor of my 
own opinions, or against those of other sects or 
parties. 

1 



2 FAITH AND BELIEF. 

I therefore intend to show what are the essen- 
tials and what the non-essentials in the faith of 
the Christian church concerning God, Christ, the 
Bible, the Church, Christian experience, and the 
Future Life. 

I know that, to many, all such attempts seem 
hazardous. Religion is so important a matter 
that the}^ cannot believe any thing belonging to 
it to be unessential. The Holy Spirit sanctifies 
to their minds every sacrament of their church, 
every word of their liturgy, every part of their 
creed, every sentence in their Bible. It seems to 
them sacrilege to say or to hint that any of these 
great helps to religion are not essential to it. If 
not the very citadel, they are at least outworks to 
be defended to the last, as a necessary protection 
to the citadel. 

The inevitable result of this is division and 
strife in the church. To each sect and party its 
own special forms of faith and worship seem not 
only useful, but vital : it is dangerous to permit 
any other. The Episcopalian thinks that with- 
out bishops there is no church ; the Presbyterian 
clings to every chapter and section of the Assem- 
bly's Catechism ; the Baptist cannot take the 
Lord's Supper with the most saintly Christian 



FAITH AND BELIEF. 3 

who has not been immersed. There can be but 
one truth, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, sa}~ 
the}', and that is ours. We honestly believe that 
we are right, and therefore we must believe others 
to be wrong. Can two walk together unless they 
are agreed? 

Paul said of himself and his fellow-Christians, 
1 ; We have this treasure in earthen vessels ; " 
but to the majority of Christian believers now, 
the vessel which contains their faith is as impor- 
tant as the faith itself. Because I drink the water 
of salvation out of a Unitarian glass instead of 
a Methodist cup or an Episcopal vase, it is 
thought that I cannot be partaking of the water 
of life. 

Nearly twenty-five centuries ago, iEsop told the 
story of the twigs which could not be broken 
when united together, but were easily snapped 
when separated. The Christian church, in its 
numerous divisions, still illustrates the sad moral 
of that fable. Here, in Boston, we have one 
hundred and eighty Protestant churches, but they 
are divided into eight or ten different sects, which 
work entirely independently of each other. Sup- 
pose they should form one grand union for Chris- 
tian work, to attack the evils around us. What 



4 FAITH AND BELIEF. 

an immense influence for good might these one 
hundred and eighty churches exercise, if they co- 
operated against the evils of pauperism, intem- 
perance, licentiousness, ignorance, and crime ! 
Suppose they had one central building, to which 
delegates from these churches should come to 
consider and act as one body in making Boston 
more pure, sweet, and safe. The Baptists might 
still immerse ; the Episcopalians keep their bish- 
ops and liturgy, — but, being thus united in one 
body against practical evils, how sure and soon 
might not God's Kingdom come among us ! 

The difficulty in the way of this consummation 
is that the church still confounds essentials and 
non-essentials. There being confessedly but one 
end, one thing needful, as the object of all relig- 
ion, they suppose that there can be but one true 
and right .way to that end ; though Paul has 
taught that there are differences of administra- 
tion, but one Lord, and diversities of operation, 
but one God. 

A great city, like New York or Chicago, has 
but one purpose, — the bringing together of those 
within and those without for mutual advantage. 
But each city has numerous avenues by which it 
is entered. There are roads which concentrate 



FAITH AND BELIEF. 5 

toward it from all quarters. There are numerous 
lines of railroads, which bring to it long trains of 
passengers and freight, entering the city on all 
sides ; steamers come to it by the lake, the river, 
the sea. But we imagine that the vast cit}' of God, 
the heavenly Jerusalem, has only one entrance, 
and that, the turnpike, where we collect the toll. 

The Lord has made his children very different 
from each other, and, being thus different, he has 
provided many different ways by which they shall 
come to him. 

Other and very great evils arise from this want 
of religious perspective which confounds the spirit 
with the letter, the substance with the form, the 
permanent with the transient, the kernel with the 
shell, the soul with the bocl}\ The spirit and 
substance of religion are one and eternal ; the 
same yesterday, to-cla}', and for ever. The form 
changes, the body decays and dies, the kernel in 
its growth shatters its shell. The law of change 
applies to the body of religion, as to that of all 
other human interests. If religion in its spirit is 
divine and eternal, in its body it is human and 
changing. Every church form, ritual, sacrament, 
is human, therefore temporaiy. Every church- 
creed is elaborated by the wit of man, therefore 



6 FAITH AND BELIEF. 

none can last for ever. The Christian church 
must say, as the Apostle Paul said, "When I 
was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a 
child, I thought as a child ; but, when I became a 
man, I put away childish things." This great 
apostle, possessing one of the most majestic of 
human intellects, declared that his own creed, 
precious as it was to him, was to pass away, and 
be forgotten. u I know in part," said he ; " and 
I teach in part. But, when that which is perfect 
is come, then that which is in part shall be done 
away. For now we see, as in a mirror, darkly 
[referring to the metallic mirrors of his time], 
but then face to face." The light of the intellect 
is reflected light, therefore we call it reflection ; 
hereafter it will be intuition. From the accuracy 
of each man's thought, even the wisest, there are 
to be made three deductions : we must first cor- 
rect it for the human equation, since all belief is 
relative ; then we must correct it again for the 
personal equation, since each man's idiosyncrasy 
colors his thought ; and finally we must correct 
it for the aberration produced by progress and 
development. It was a great discovery in astron- 
omy, when Bradley found that the progress of the 
earth through space caused an aberration of the 



FAITH AND BELIEF. 7 

light coming from the stars, and that this aberra- 
tion must be allowed for. So we must allow for 
the aberration of light in our own minds, caused 
by the fact that we are in progress. The individ- 
ual, as he grows, puts away childish things ; and 
so society and humanity, moving swiftly forward 
in the vast orbit of its heaven-ordained progress 
through the ages and eternities, must also put 
away its childish things, and for ever be learning 
more and more the language of manly thought 
and manly piety. 

The soul which has no singleness of aim is dis- 
tracted and divided, and loses its powder. If the 
eye is single, the whole bod} r is full of light ; if 
the eye is double, the whole body is full of dark- 
ness. It is so in every thing else. It is so also 
in religion. The superstition which makes second- 
ary things of equal importance with the primary 
clouds and degrades the soul. When Jesus came 
to the house of the Jewish maidens and saw Mar- 
tha's mind distracted with a thousand cares, while 
Mary, recognizing what was then of supreme in> 
portance, used this great opportunity by devoting 
herself solely to listening to the divine truth which 
had entered her home, Jesus saw in it the images 
of dissipation and of singleness of soul. ' ' Martha, 



8 FAITH AND BELIEF. 

Martha, thou art careful and troubled about many 
things ; but one thing is needful." The church 
has always had its many Marthas and its few 
Marys, — its Marthas, careful and troubled about 
creeds and rituals, sacraments and sabbaths, 
priesthood and altar ; and its Marys, not indeed 
wishing that these should be left undone, but never 
letting them interfere with the one thing needful, 
— love to God and love to man. 

To all this what do the Marthas reply ? What 
did the original Martha reply to Jesus ? Probably 
she said, "It is all very well for Maiy to be neg- 
lecting her duties, in order to listen to you ; but 
who is to help me get the dinner? " So the Mar- 
thas in the church reply : " It is all very well to 
say that love is the one thing needful ; that love 
fulfils the whole law ; that he who dwells in love 
dwells in God, and God in him. But how are we 
to get that love, except we use the means? He 
who wishes the end wishes the means? Piety 
and charity are, we admit, the only essential ends ; 
but the means are equally essential. It is essen- 
tial, in order to have love, to be in the true church ; 
for out of this there is no salvation. It is essen- 
tial to have the true belief, for we are saved by 
the word of truth, and without faith no man can 



FAITH AND BELIEF. 9 

be justified. It is necessary also to be converted ; 
for unless a man is born again, lie cannot see the 
kingdom of God. 

In future lectures, I shall discuss the essentials 
and the non-essentials in regard to the church and 
conversion. I now ask you to attend to this sec- 
ond point made by our friends, the Christian 
Marthas. They speak thus: " The New Testa- 
ment says we are justified by faith. When the 
Apostle was called upon by the jailer to tell him 
what he must do to be saved, he did not reply, 
' Love God and man,' but he said, ' Believe on 
the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved.' 
And Paul was right, for that was the step he 
could take at once, and by an immediate act of 
obedience accept Christ as his Saviour ; then, 
having done that, he would reach at last the end, 
which is love. Love, therefore, is the essential 
end ; but a true faith is the no less essential means 
to that end." This is their argument. 

If this be true, and if a true faith means a cor- 
rect belief of the great doctrines of Christianity, 
then it follows that the one thing needful for us 
is, first of all, to study theology, in order to find 
out what the true and vital doctrines are. We 
ought carefully to read the innumerable contro- 



10 FAITH AND BELIEF. 

versies about the Trinity, Total Depravity, the 
Atonement, the Deity of Christ, and the Way of 
Salvation. Until this is clone, and done correctly, 
and the true belief is reached, there is no safet}\ 
How much mental miseiy, anxiety, gloom, de- 
spair, have come from this doctrine that a sound 
belief on such points as these is essential to the 
salvation of the soul ! Moreover, the moment 
3^011 assume that any accurate statement of belief 
is essential, you can find no place where } r ou can 
logically stop. For in any system of doctrine 
every part is logically dependent on every other 
part, and the whole must stand or fall together. 
As an illustration of this, let me state a fact from 
ecclesiastical histoiy. The Presbyterian church 
of the United States has a creed, and that creed 
is the Assembly's Catechism. Now, parts of that 
statement are so behind and below the convictions 
reached by modern thought that it has been held 
very loosely in many places, and accepted merely 
for substance of doctrine. In the year 1837, an 
earnest theologian, Robert J. Breckinridge, in- 
duced the General Assembly to excommunicate 
four synods, containing some forty thousand mem- 
bers, for heresy ; the error being in relation to 
the origin of sin. The belief of the Old School 



FAITH AND BELIEF. 11 

was this : that God could have prevented sin, but 
would not do it, because it was essential to a 
moral system. The error of the New School, for 
which the synods were excommunicated, was in 
believing that God would have prevented sin, but 
could not, because it was essential to a moral sys- 
tem. Now this distinction seems to us a small 
matter ; but a trained theologian sees that it is 
essential to the integrity of the whole s} T stem that 
the ' i could " should precede the ' 4 would " in this 
statement. So, when a single leading proposition 
of a creed is made essential, even' minute infer- 
ence becomes also essential. A creed is like a 
chain, whose strength is measured by the strength 
of the weakest part. An acute theologian is like 
a skilled engineer building a dam, who knows that, 
if he leaves the smallest leak in any part, the 
whole dam will be finally swept away. 

What, then, is our reply to this argument? We 
admit that faith is an essential element of human 
progress, — essential as a means to the growth and 
perfection of man. But we den}' that belief is 
the same as faith, and we deny that the belief of 
any proposition is essential to human salvation. 
We full}- agree with John Wesley, who once said 
that ' ' a string of opinions is no more Christian 



12 FAITH AND BELIEF. 

faith than a string of beads is Christian prac- 
tice." 

When the jailer at Philippi believed on the Lord 
Jesus Christ, what was his theological belief ? 
What were his opinions about the Trinity or the 
Atonement ? His faith was simply a trust in the 
superior power and goodness of that being of 
whom these wonderful persons before him declared 
themselves the messengers. The servant, he 
thought, could not be greater than the master ; 
nor he that was sent greater than he that sent him. 
Therefore, he was willing to trust to this new ad- 
vent of light and power, and joins this persecuted 
body whose souls were so full of calm and jo} r , 
and who seemed so protected by a present Provi- 
dence. His faith was trust in something higher 
and better than himself. 

What was the theological belief of those whom 
Jesus healed ? What was the creed of the sinful 
woman whom he forgave, and to whom he said, 
' 4 Thy faith hath saved thee ; go in peace " ? 
What were the doctrinal opinions of the Eoman 
soldier, of whom he declared, " I have not found 
so great faith, no, not in Israel" ? What were 
the speculative dogmas held by all those whose 
faith is commemorated in the eleventh chapter of 



FAITH AND BELIEF. 13 

the Hebrews ? What were the views of Abel, in 
regard to the Trinity ? Was Enoch a Calvinist or 
an Arminian ? What doctrines were held by Noah 
and Abraham and Sarah, Isaac, Jacob, Gideon, 
Barak, and Samson ? In all these cases, what was 
their faith bnt this : a looking up with trust to 
something higher than themselves ; better than 
themselves ; something above this visible and 
sensible world ; a confidence that, besides all that 
is seen and temporal, there is something divine, 
invisible, eternal? This was their faith, and this 
is the substance of all faith. For this their faith, 
Samson and Gideon are commended as examples 
to us all. 

This faith we believe and know to be essential 
to progress. We can only rise to a higher plane 
by trusting in some power better than ourselves. 
In order to go up, we must look up. 

God gives, in the morning of life, a great pro- 
vision of faith as an outfit. Little children are 
full of trust, and by this trust they learn rapidly. 
Because men and women are larger and stronger 
than themselves, they naturally look upon them as 
knowing every thing and able to do ever}' thing. 
They may often be deceived and misled by their 
infantile credulity ; but without it they could 



14: FAITH AND BELIEF. 

never make such rapid progress. Undeterred 
either by vanity or doubt, they ask a thousand 
questions every day of every one about them. 
This perpetual looking up for guidance, knowl- 
edge, help, is what makes the soul of a child 
unfold, as the buds open in the warm airs of 
spring. 

As children grow up, they do not outgrow the 
need of perpetual faith in their fellow-men. The 
more highly civilized society becomes, the more 
men are obliged to trust in each other. Savage 
life is filled with distrust and suspicion. The 
backwoodsman trusts in himself, and depends on 
himself to supply his own wants. But as societ}^ 
is developed through its different stages, from 
the savage state to that of the hunter, from the 
hunter's life to the pastoral state, from that to 
the highly complex condition of modern society 
in Christian lands, mutual trust increases. We 
sleep in peace, trusting to the protection of the 
police. We go to our affairs, trusting our homes 
to the guardianship of the laws. We trust in the 
merchant to sell us the article we need ; to our 
physician to understand and treat aright our ill- 
ness ; to our lawyer to defend our rights when 
assailed. All our societ} T is built on the perpetual 



FAITH AND BELIEF. 15 

faith of man in man. We walk by faith all clay 
long. True, there is deception, knavery, cheat- 
ing ; but society would stand still to-morrow if 
there were not a hundred times as much truth as 
falsehood in the transactions of common life. 
When we trust our brother, whom we have seen, 
we are learning to trust God, whom we have not 
seen. Our faith in man is really faith in the great 
laws of human nature : it is faith that humanity 
is essentially good, not evil, made by God and a 
manifestation of him. 

The difference between faith and belief is ob- 
vious, and the distinction very important. Belief 
is purely an intellectual act, the result of argu- 
ment and evidence. Where the evidence is before 
us, belief is involuntary. . The object of belief is 
a proposition, and there are no degrees about it. 
We either believe the proposition or we do not. 
If we hesitate about it, and are not quite ready 
to assent to it, then we do not yet believe it. And 
a belief does not necessarily make a man any 
better. The devils believe and tremble. You 
find good men and bad men believing all sorts of 
creeds. Some men are uninfluenced by the noblest 
creeds, though they assent to them ; some are 
uninjured by the lowest and basest. 



16 FAITH AND BELIEF, 

In all these respects, how different is faith! 
This involves an intellectual element indeed, for 
we trust in some power or person whom we know. 
He that cometh to God or to man must believe 
that they are. But faith has also a moral element, 
for we trust in good, not in evil. Hope is also 
involved in it. We have faith in something bet- 
ter than we yet see. Love is in it, for we do not 
give our faith except where we also give some- 
thing of our affection. And, moreover, faith is 
an act. We give ourselves in trust, we lean, we 
confide, we repose on the good which we know 
and to which we look up. And this faith, like all 
other acts, increases and strengthens by habit. 
We can have a little faith, and we can acquire 
more. And this trust in something higher, better, 
nobler, wiser, alwaj^s makes us better ourselves. 
B}^ looking up, we rise. And thus we realize the 
truth of those lines of Daniel which Coleridge 
was so fond of quoting : — 

" Unless above himself he can 
Erect himself, how poor a thing is man ! " 

Individual man is weak, ignorant, liable to de- 
ceive and be deceived. But the human nature of 
which he partakes is higher than he, — better than 
any individual. — for it is that common human 



FAITH AND BELIEF. 17 

nature which contains the law of progress, and 
the power of an endless development upward and 
onward. Our faith in man is therefore still the 
same. It is looking up to something higher. It 
is trust in man not only as he is, but as he is 
made and meant to be. It is the substance of 
things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. 

But the most wonderful fact of human nature 
remains to be stated. It is man's religious nature 
and his religious faith. 

Wherever man exists, he believes in God. His 
belief may be of a low and rudimentary kind, but 
it is there. A creature of time and sense, sur- 
rounded with the engrossing interests of this life, 
this life never satisfies him. He looks out of the 
seen into the unseen, looks up out of the sunlight 
of this sensible world into the mystery of the all- 
surrounding world outside of space and time. 

" Placed on this isthmus of a middle state, 
A being darkly wise and rudely great ; 
Chaos of thought and passion all confused ; 
Still by himself abused, or disabused; 
Created half to rise and half to fall, 
Great Lord of all things, yet a prey to all ; 
Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled, 
The glory, jest, and riddle of the world." 

2 



18 FAITH AND BELIEF. 

Yes, man is all that, but something more. 
Some convictions, some ideas, deep rooted in his 
inmost nature, hold him fast to the infinite and 
eternal. He looks back through the long geologic 
ages, but the}' cannot content his reason : he finds 
an eternity behind them all. He looks through 
the immensities of the universe to the faint star- 
clusters at frightful distances in the enormous 
space which surrounds our little globe, and his 
reason commands him to believe in an infinite 
space beyond. He looks up, in imagination, 
through a long vista of intelligences higher than 
man, angels and archangels, cherubim and sera- 
phim. Analogy teaches him to believe that higher 
than thought can climb, or the fancy conceive, 
or the understanding comprehend, there must be 
series above series, rank above rank of powers ; 
a hierarchy of spiritual beings extending without 
end up to the throne of God. But he cannot rest 
in this conception : he must go beyond, and gaze 
on the one great central power of the universe, — 
above all height, below all depth, — the Almighty, 
the Eternal, the One above. He is so made that 
he can never stop in any lower worship, but passes 
up through all mythologies of old religion to the 
First Cause, the perfect Being. 



FAITH AND BELIEF. 19 

This is the natural faith of man, not of one sect 
or creed ; and the primal faith, which Jesus came 
to restore and to exalt. Abraham saw his day, 
because Abraham believed essentially in the truth 
of Jesus. Something of his day was also seen by 
Socrates, by Zoroaster, by Confucius, by Buddha, 
for they also lifted their race to a higher faith in 
some unspoken majesty of truth and goodness ; 
some radiance seen, though but in a glass darkly, 
of the holy spirit of truth. This faith, at least, 
they all had in an unseen Power, higher than 
airy thing seen, who would help those who came to 
Him. 

I am a transcendentalist. I do not believe that 
man's senses tell him all he knows. Man is more 
certain of those truths which come to him through 
his reason than of those which come through his 
senses. " All his knowledge," according to the 
statement of Immanuel Kant, " all his knowledge 
begins with sensible experience, but all does not 
come from experience." He knows the ideal 
realities received through reason better than he 
knows those transmitted through sense. He 
knows cause and effect, phenomenon and sub- 
stance, right and wrong, the infinite and the eter- 
nal, his own identity, his power of free choice. 



20 FAITH AND BELIEF. 

These ideas are divinely created within him, di- 
vinely rooted in the very texture of his reason. 
By the unalterable and majestic laws of nature, 
which pervade the world, unchanging and per- 
sistent, God has bound the outward universe to 
himself, and established all its variet}^ into one 
vast order. And by the ideas, equally fixed and 
unchanging, in the soul of man, he holds fast 
to himself every created intelligence in a similar 
unity, and is the centre of the visible and invisible 
universe. 

To this statement, however, I hear this reply : 
" This may be all true, as far as it goes. This is 
pure theism, and is no doubt a vast step upward 
from sheer unbelief. But it is not Christian faith. 
That is more than a mere instinct of trust in 
God : it is trust in him, because of what he has 
done for us through his Son. It is trust in God's 
grace, mediated through the sacrifice of Christ." 

I gladly admit and proclaim that Christ has 
lifted the world to a higher faith than it had be- 
fore, or has now outside of Christianity. But is 
it a different faith? or is it not the same, deepened, 
purified, and elevated ? When Paul spoke to the 
Greeks at Athens, he did not tell them he had 
brought them another God or a new religion ; but 



FAITH AND BELIEF, 21 

that he had come to make clear to them the being 
whom they already worshipped. ' i Whom ye igno- 
rantly worship, him declare I unto you." If Paul 
believed that the Greeks were ignorantly wor- 
shipping the true God, why should we deny that 
the Chinese and Hindoos, the ancient Persians 
and Egyptians, the negroes of Africa and the In- 
dians of North America, have also been ignorantly 
worshipping the true God? Have not they also, 
in all their different idolatries and superstitions, 
been feeling after God, if haply they might find 
him? When the Indian mother, whose infant 
had fallen into the river, stretched out her arms 
and cried, " O Thou Great Everywhere ! save my 
child ! " was she not crying out to the living God, 
as David was when he fasted and prayed for Ms 
child, as any Christian mother is who calls on God 
to-day ? 

To see what is the essential element in Chris- 
tian faith, let us analyze it, as we find it developed 
in Christian experience. For this purpose we will 
select some of the most perfect specimens, the 
highest types in the history of our religion. 

In the fourth century of our era, there lived a 
man whose influence on human thought has been 
so vast, so continued, so unbroken, that it fills us 



22 FAITH AND BELIEF. 

with astonishment at the power sometimes dele- 
gated to a single man. The theology of Europe 
has been moulded during fourteen centuries by 
this master-mind. He was one of those 

" fiery souls, which, working out their way, 
Fretted the puny body to decay, 
And o'er-informed their tenement of clay." 

There is not a little Baptist church to-day in 
Kansas, not a Methodist church in Florida, not a 
Scotch farmer or English statesman, but is influ- 
enced by that African bishop. Not a Roman 
Catholic missionary in Japan and Brazil but is 
guided by the dead hand of Aurelius Augustine. 
His theology we know, and we reject it. But 
what was his faith ? Read his "Confessions," and 
see. In that book, he has unlocked his heart. 
There is the deepest, sweetest essence of his re- 
ligion. And, changing possibly a few words or 
phrases, there is not a sentence, not a line of that 
most devout of all appeals to God, but could be 
uttered as the prayer of a Unitarian Christian, 
and meet the deepest wants of a Buddhist and 
Lama in the mountains of Thibet. It is a cry 
of the child to his father and mother ; a simple 
utterance of perfect trust in an infinite love ; it is 
human love casting itself on the infinite tender- 



FAITE AND BELIEF. 23 

ness, with perfect confidence that he hears and 
that he pities. 

And now come down twelve centuries later. 
The Roman Catholics regard Augustine as the 
Father of their theology. Let us take the foun- 
der of Protestantism, Martin Luther. The battle- 
cry by which this hero broke the sleep of ages was 
the echo of Paul's words, "We are justified by 
faith." What led Luther to his great work ? His 
own profound experience. A poor monk in an 
Augustinian monastery, he tried to save his soul 
by prayer and fasting, penance and sacrament. 
But all in vain : these monkish practices only made 
him feel more heavily the burden of his sins. At 
last, by the mediation of a brother monk, Luther 
was led to go to God himself, and find a Saviour 
in him. God, in Christ, reconciled Luther to 
himself. Henceforth all the ceremonies and sacra- 
ments of the church, all acts of ascetic denial, all 
hope of salvation by priestly absolution or papal 
indulgence, were cast aside. Simple faith. in God, 
through Christ, had created a joy in Luther's 
heart, a sense of heavenly peace and hope, that 
was like a new moral force sent into the world. 
It shook the seat of the papacy in Rome ; it pen- 
etrated the emperor's palace and the peasant's 



24 FAITH AND BELIEF. 

hut. Pardon freely bestowed, unbought grace 
and goodness, — this was the living experience 
which made a new world and a new civilization 
in Europe. Compare Luther's faith with that of 
Augustine, and you will find them essentially the 
same. Their views of church and of life were a 
thousand miles apart ; their faith was the same 
simple trust in the divine love. 

One more example from later times. During 
the last century there arose in England a relig- 
ious movement, which, to my mind, combines in 
itself more depth and breadth, more freedom and 
more elevation than any other since that of 
Luther. And the root of this was another return 
to the same simple element of childlike trust in 
God. When John Wesley was crossing the At- 
lantic on his way to Georgia, to become a mis- 
sionary to the heathen, he was what we now call 
a Ritualist, or Puseyite, in religion. The method 
of salvation to him was to fast and pray, to re- 
nounce the world, to save his soul b} r fidelity to 
all the minutest requisitions of the church, by 
daily communion, hours of prayer, and the like. 
But on this voyage they encountered a fearful 
gale ; and in the confusion and terror of the storm, 
when the awful tempest laid the vessel on its 



FAITH AND BELIEF. 25 

beam, and they seemed about to perish, some 

Moravians on board were calmly singing hymns 

of trust to God. The honest Wesley, looking 

into his own heart, found no such tranquillity 

there, but a secret, unconquered fear of death 

and judgment. After the gale had blown out, he 

asked the Moravians why they felt no fear. They 

replied, " We trust in God." " But your women 

and your children, they also were so calm," said 

Wesley. ' ' Our women and children are not 

afraid to die ; they also trust in God." Here was 

a mystery to Wesley. He had believed in all the 

orthodoxy of the church ; had practised all the 

ceremonies of his religion more than others ; had 

been accounted a man of the most eminent piety. 

What was this faith, then, that he needed? This 

idea haunted him daring his sta}' in Georgia, and 

gave him no rest. It sent him back to England. 

There he took no counsel with bishops or doctors, 

or those called leaders of the church, but found 

his poor Moravian friends to learn their secret. 

At last, after many struggles and prayers, he 

learned the truth, that 

" A man's best things are nearest him, 
Lie close around his feet." 

The living faith, which he had missed so long in 



26 FAITH AND BELIEF. 

his arduous struggle for salvation, was the faith 
of a little child, who knows nothing about sin or 
salvation, but trusts without a doubt in a Father's 
love. It was because it was so simple that he had 
missed it so long. He had looked for a salvation 
strange, mysterious, and difficult, to be bought 
by sacrifice and worship, and the solemn forms 
of an ancient church. But it was simply and 
only to forget about himself and his salvation, to 
leave penance and prayers, and to put himself 
into the arms of the heavenly Father, thinking no 
more about himself or his own soul, but about 
saving the souls of others in the strength of the 
Infinite love. Thus Wesley passed through ex- 
actly the same experience as that of Paul, Augus- 
tine, and Luther, and arrived at last at the same 
essential faith, and found the truth of Christ's 
great sa} T ing, that to be converted was only to be- 
come again as a little child. Then was revealed 
to him the meaning which our translation misses, 
of that other profound saying of the Master : " He 
who would save his soul loses it ; but he who is 
willing to lose his soul for the sake of the gospel 
love and work, he finds it." Not when we think 
about saving our soul can we save it ; but when 
we think about God's love and his children's 



FAITH AND BELIEF. 27 

needs, then it is saved for us, while we are caring 
for others. In that hour, Wesley passed up out 
of the religion of ritualism to a higher plane. In 
that hour, and not before, was Methodism born. 
Then, through this new experience of Wesle} T , 
was a fresh impulse of heavenly love poured into 
human hearts, and a vast movement began which 
has brought blessings to millions on both sides of 
the Atlantic. 

Thus, in all these cases, we see that faith is 
essentially the same thing. It is casting all our 
care for body and soul on Him who cares for us. 
It is trusting in God as a faithful Creator, in 
Christ as a dear friend and helper, who teaches 
us to say, " Our Father." Many theologies, but 
one faith. There may be a hundred beliefs, as 
there imrv be a hundred roads to London or New 
York. But, when we have entered the city, we are 
all in the same place, side by side. There is 
neither Jew nor Greek, neither Trinitarian nor 
Unitarian there ; neither Catholic nor Protestant, 
but all are one in Christ Jesus, and in the love of 
the great Father. 

Faith may even sometimes appear under what 
seems to be unbelief. A soldier, dying on a field 
of battle in our war for freedom and union, was 



28 FAITH AND BELIEF. 

asked by a chaplain, who tells the story, to trust 
in the atoning blood of Christ, and ask God for 
pardon. " No, not now," said the soldier: "I 
did not do it when I was strong and well : I will 
not do it now merely to please God and to pre- 
vent him from sending me to hell. That would 
be the act of a coward." Though the chaplain 
did not see it, this was really an act of trust in 
God. The soldier preferred rather to trust him- 
self to God as he was than try to pacify the 
Almighty by a death-bed confession. And that 
was faith. So when John Stuart Mill wrote his 
famous sentence, protesting against the notion 
of Mr. Mansell that the goodness of God could be 
essentially different from ours, and declared that 
" if he must go to hell for believing in the good- 
ness which seemed to him good, then to hell he 
would go," he also was really expressing faith in 
God as a faithful Creator, who, having made the 
human mind to believe in right and in truth, 
would not demand of it to believe differently. 
And this saying of Mill's is also in essence one 
with the doctrine of those New England divines 
who thought no man truly converted till he was 
willing to be damned for the glory of God. For 
John Stuart Mill said that he was ready to be 



FAITH AND BELIEF. 29 

damned for the cause of honesty and truth, and 
that is for the glory of God, so far as any thing 
we do can glorify him. Being honest, being true, 
standing by our true convictions, that glorifies 
God. The old Arab sheik, Job, said the same 
when he refused to confess himself a sinner until 
he could see how and why he was a sinner, and 
answered the pious persuasions of his friends with 
this immortal utterance : ' c Shall I speak words of 
wind to the Almighty? Can I please him, as I 
would please a man, by outward submission and 
empty flattery?" 

The same thought is expressed in another way 
in one of the poems of our New England Eobert 
Burns. It is the same essential, universal faith, 
which, beginning low down in the heart of the 
savage and the Pagan, unfolds into higher forms 
in the Christian, but is always the same in Cath- 
olic or Protestant, Methodist or Unitarian. And 
so we find it expressed in the tender strain of our 
Quaker poet, who says, as Jesus said in the gar- 
den, and as all true faith responds everywhere, 
Ci Xot my will, but thine, be done : " — 

" The autumn-time has come 
On woods that dream of bloom, 
And over purpling vines 
The low sun fainter shines. 



30 FAITH AND BELIEF. 

"The aster-flower is failing, 
The hazel's gold is paling ; 
Yet overhead, more near, 
The eternal stars appear. 

" And present gratitude 
Insures the future's good ; 
And for the things I see 
I trust the things to be, 

" That, in the paths untrod 
And the long days of God, 
My feet shall still be led, 
My heart be comforted. 

" Others shall sing the song, 
Others shall right the wrong, 
Finish what I begin, 
And all I fail of, win. 

" What matter, I or they ? 
Mine, or another's day, 
So the right word be said, 
And life be sweeter made ? 

" Hail to the coming singers ! 
Hail to the brave light-bringers ! 
Forward I reach, and share 
All that they sing, or dare. 

" The airs of heaven blow o'er me, 
A glory shines before me, 
Of what mankind shall be, 
Pure, generous, brave, and free. 



FAITH AND BELIEF. 31 



" King, bells, in unreared steeples, 
The joy of new-born peoples ! 
Sound, trumpets, far-off blown. 
Your triumph is my own." 

This is the very breath and essence of that faith 
which trusts the great God, the Divine Friend, 
the Infinite Tenderness, the dear Father of us all; 
above, below, around, within ; from whom, and 
through whom, and to whom are all things. 



II. 

CHRIST AND CHRISTIANITY. 

THE two views on this subject which are the 
most significant, influential, and interesting, 
stand as opposite extremes. First comes the 
grand orthodoxy of the Church, which declares 
Christianity to have been a miraculous interposi- 
tion of the Supreme Being for the rescue of the 
human race ; declares that Christianity is the only 
true religion, out of which there is no possible 
salvation ; that Christ was very God and very 
Man, — Prophet, Priest, and King. Prophet, as 
teaching infallibly supernatural truth. Priest, as 
dying to make an atonement to God for the sins 
of the human race. King, as God himself, second 
person in the Trinity, whose right it is to demand 
absolute obedience from all his creatures. 

This view stands at one end of the scale of 
religious belief. TTe will call it Superxaturalis^i. 
At the other end of the scale is the view of those 
who deny any supernatural character to Christ or 
Christianity, — the view of such writers as Strauss 

3 



34 CHRIST AND CHRISTIANITY. 

in Germany, Renan in France, Conway in Eng- 
land, Frothingham in America. According to 
them, Christianity was a natural development of 
humanity, like every other religion ; better in 
some things than they, — good and useful once, 
but now outgrown, discredited, and passed by. 
Instead of it we are to have either no religion, but 
instead thereof science, art, and literature, — or 
else a larger and better religion, that of Human- 
ity. We will call this view Naturalism. 

Now, when we find two such opposite and ex- 
treme views, each advocated by earnest and in- 
telligent men, honest in their convictions, and 
bent on converting the whole world to their own 
faith; where, probably, does the truth he? 

The old answer was, "The truth lies some- 
where between these extremes, somewhere in the 
middle. Believe a little less than supernaturalism, 
believe a little more than naturalism, and you will 
be about right." But half views are feeble views. 
At each extreme there is an idea, a principle, and 
therefore strong conviction ; in the middle there 
is apt to be only confusion of thought and weak- 
ness of purpose. A better philosophy of the 
human mind has taught us that truth is not in 
the middle, but on both sides ; that one extreme 



CHRIST AND CHRISTIANITY. 35 

embodies one truth, and the other embodies its 
antagonistic truth. On either side is conviction ; 
in the middle, hesitation and lukewarmness. 
Goethe long ago expressed this view: " You 
think that truth is in the mean between extremes ; 
truth is not there, but the paradox." What 
truth, let us therefore ask, is there in the old 
supernaturalism, and what truth in the modern 
naturalism ? Finding and accepting the truths on 
both sides, the}' will supply each other's defects, 
correct each other's errors, sift out non-essentials, 
and leave the essentials. This is the method of 
modern science, — to find all the truth there is, 
sure that it will all be found at last to be in har- 
mony with itself. 

AVhat is the truth in supernaturalism? 

It is that Christianity is not only deeper, higher, 
broader, better than any other religion, but essen- 
tially different from every other, in this : that its 
truth is so absolute and so universal as to be fitted 
to become the religion of mankind. It is capable 
of doing all the work which can be asked of a 
religion ; that is, to teach ever essential truth, to 
give to man peace with God, and to purify him 
from evil. To prove Christianity to be a super- 
natural religion is not necessary ; neither is this 



36 CHRIST AND CHRISTIANITY. 

an adequate distinction. For God, who is above 
nature, is always descending into nature, so that 
the supernatural is in all things. God, as Paul 
declares, " is above all, and through all, and in 
you all." To say that Christianity is super- 
natural is to say, not too much, but too little. 
Nor is it enough to say, ' \ Christianity is the 
exclusively true religion." We must go further, 
and maintain that it is the inclusively true religion. 
That which excludes and shuts out is not so great 
as that which takes in and receives. So Christi- 
anity has received into itself all the good of many 
S3^stems, — the philosophy and art of Greece, the 
laws of Rome, the mysticism of India, the mono- 
theism of the Jews, the triad of Eg}3>t, the war 
between good and evil taught by Zoroaster, the 
reverence for ancestors and the conservatism of 
China, the Scandinavian faith in liberty and 
progress. All the prophets who have been since 
the world began, and all the civilizations of the 
past, have, like the wise men of the East, brought 
their gifts to the infant Messiah. There is in this 
wonderful religion the power of assimilating to 
itself all that is true and good everywhere. It is 
like the sea, "into which all rivers run, and yet 
it is not full." 



CHRIST AND CHRISTIANITY. 37 

The only progressive religion in the world to- 
day is Christianity. All others are decayed, 
arrested, or retrograde. But Christianity is capa- 
ble of self-development. It unfolds itself into 
new forms, puts forth new branches, and makes 
every da}' a new heavens and a new earth. In 
ages of universal war, it unfolded into monastic 
institutions, — islands of peace in the midst of 
the stormy ocean ; oases of knowledge in the 
desert of ignorance. When all society seemed 
falling apart amid the deluge of barbarism, it 
created the Papacy, as a central force to hold 
Christendom together. When this force became 
excessive and tyrannical, it suddenly produced 
the Protestant Reformation, which saved personal 
liberty in Europe. And when this outbreak of 
fieiy lava had become too rigid, it again burst 
forth in such fountains of thought as Puritanism, 
Presbyterianism, Quakerism, Methodism, and the 
multiform varieties of modern opinion. 

I am told that Christianity stands in the way of 
progress ; that it is an incubus on human thought. 
Explain then, if you can, the manifest fact that 
the progress of humanity in science, art, litera- 
ture, is co-extensive with Christendom. Who 
goes to-day to study in Mohammedan universities ? 



38 CHRIST AND CHRISTIANITY. 

What astronomical discoveries are made in the 
observatories of China? Was it a Hindu who 
invented the steam engine, the locomotive, the 
photograph, the electric telegraph? Who are the 
great painters and sculptors of Turkey, Russia, 
Japan? Mention, if }^ou please, the poets, his- 
torians, mathematicians, orators, novelists, phi- 
losophers among the Buddhists. In Christendom 
alone is the human race in progress, and it is 
the only religion which is itself progressive. We 
have a right to claim that it will become more 
and more the light of the world. 

The principle of this wonderful vitality is to be 
found in Christ himself. Christianity is not an 
abstract creed, a system of thought ; it is not a 
philosophical system, — it is the personal influence 
of a great soul. Christendom may say, as the 
Apostle said, " The life I now live, I live by faith 
in the Son of God." One method by w^hich the 
Creator causes the progress of humanity is by 
sending new impulses into the world through great 
men. Every civilization has been largely made 
what it is by the influence of great souls. Greece 
became Greece by means of Aristides and Milti- 
ades, Socrates and Plato ; Aristotle, Homer, iEs- 
chylus, Pindar, Thucydides, Phidias. Take the 



CHRIST AND CHRISTIANITY. 39 

great men out of European history, — its goodly 
company of heroes and saints, its noble army of 
prophets, poets, and statesmen, — and it would 
collapse to the dead level of Africa. What would 
England be without its Shakespeare and Spenser ; 
its Locke, Newton, Milton ; its Alfred, and Crom- 
well, and Hampden? What would America be if 
we had never had the Pilgrim Fathers, nor Samuel 
Adams, nor Washington, nor Franklin? 

These are the living lights, 
That from our bold green heights 

Shall shine afar, 
Till those who name the name 
Of freedom, to the flame 
Come, as the Magi came 

To Bethlehem's star. 

The great souls of history almost constitute 
history. But one towers above them all, — so 
that, as Horace said of Zeus, "There is nothing 
like him, nothing next to him." When w^e think 
of China, we name Confucius. Zoroaster shines 
through the darkness of three thousand years 
from ancient Bactria. The mild Buddha has 
spread his benign influence over the whole of 
Eastern Asia during twenty-five centuries. The 
civilizations of which these were the inspiration 



40 CHRIST AND CHRISTIANITY. 

are fading away ; but wherever the word of Jesus 
goes to-day, new life flows from it into the soul. 
Liberty of speech and thought grows out of it ; 
popular education attends it ; a government of 
laws, not force, has been created by it. It bal- 
ances order against freedom ; it combines conser- 
vatism and reform ; it brings consolation to the 
bereaved, comfort to the sorrowing, and help to 
the forlorn. And all this is simply an unfolding 
of the life of Christ himself. 

I have seen on the outskirts of our land a town 
spring up, like Jacob's gourd, almost in a night. 
I have been in such places where there might be a 
population of perhaps one or two thousand people, 
many of them outlaws and desperadoes, all of them 
unrestrained by the civilities of life. There were 
no laws there but such as the population chose to 
fancy ; no churches, no schools, no newspapers ; 
but bar-rooms and gambling-houses, fighting and 
profanity, and the masteiy of the red-handed 
murderer. Into such a place as I have described, 
there comes some poor Methodist or Baptist 
preacher, all his worldly goods in his saddle-bags. 
He preaches where he can, — in a bar-room or a 
tavern, or perhaps in the street. He goes in the 
strength of God among these moral maniacs, and 



CHRIST AND CHRISTIANITY. 41 

appeals to motives latent in their breasts and un- 
known to themselves. But conscience is roused ; 
the sense of an awe and nrystery higher than this 
world enters their souls. They awaken as from a 
horrid dream ; they come to themselves, change 
their lives, and find a strange peace descending 
into their hearts. Our philosophers who write in 
their quiet studies in New York or Boston may 
believe that Christianity is outgrown, and that the 
splendid figure of Jesus has passed out of our 
philosophy. But while thousands of humble 
Christian preachers are thus, by the power of the 
divine word and life, laying the foundation of 
order in the land, I think that Christ is as near 
and as real to us to-day as he was to the Apostle 
Paul or the Apostle John. 

I believe, with Augustine, with Luther, and 
with Fenelon, with Wesley and Swedenborg, that 
Christianity is the life of Jesus himself, prolonged 
and unfolded on the earth. We are told by mod- 
ern critics that we cannot know much about the 
historic Christ, — there are so many contradictions 
and difficulties in the gospel narrative, and no 
harmonious whole. So speaks the lower criticism, 
analytic, destructive, negative. But the higher 
criticism, s} T mpathetic, synthetic, positive, crea- 



42 CHRIST AND CHRISTIANITY. 

■» 

tive, ever brings the historic Christ more near to 
our understandings, no less than to our hearts. 
As the world obej^s him more faithfully, it learns 
to know him more truly. When he went up to 
God, he did not go away from man. He is still 
the great power in human history, the great motor 
in human progress. He is still u the Word made 
flesh, dwelling among us." 

And who was Christ? I do not accept the 
scholastic theology of the Church, the definitions 
of Aquinas, the phrases invented by Tertullian, 
because I think these formulas hide his real div- 
inity. I believe him more divine than the Church 
has stated him to be, not less. I see in him more 
of God, not less, than I can find in this technical 
theology. These mediaeval phrases do not reveal 
Christ ; they conceal him. I lose, when I listen 
to them, my all-loving Father and my most 
tender of brothers. My mind is confused and 
darkened, not enlightened. 

Leaving, then, all theological terms, and en- 
deavoring to find the secret of this wonderful 
virtue, which has gone out of Jesus into the world, 
we ask what Jesus claimed to be, and what the 
New Testament teaches concerning him. We as- 
sume that however much the four Gospels may 



CHRIST AND CHRISTIANITY. 43 

differ in details, in spirit and substance they are 
agreed. Admit all that the minute critics may 
claim, there is no doubt that these four honest and 
simple narratives present a portrait so original 
that they could not have invented it ; so consistent 
with itself that it proves a real person behind it ; 
and so superior to all that the world has seen that 
this person is an adequate explanation of the 
origin of that sublime faith which we call Chris- 
tianity. 

First. Then, whatever else he was, he is de- 
scribed as a perfect man, " made in all points like 
his brethren," tempted like a man, suffering like a 
man, calling all men his brother-men, praying to 
God like a man, and, at last, dying like a man. 
Instead of beginning with his divinity, as is the 
custom, and going down, we will begin with his 
humanity, and see how far we can go up. 

Secondly. He was by birth a Jew, — a patriot, 
loving his country, his people, and its city, rev- 
erencing Moses and the prophets, and saying that 
he did not come to destroy them. But }~et he 
was wholly emancipated from Jewish prejudices, 
bigotry, and narrowness ; he was a radical in his 
treatment of the Jewish Sabbath, the Jewish tem- 
ple, ritual, and priesthood. The worship he taught 



44 CHRIST AND CHRISTIANITY. 

was not Jewish, but the worship of the Father in 
spirit and in truth. The honest publican he 
counted nearer to God than the pious Pharisee. 
And, in his description of the great judgment, he 
declared that not those who prophesied in his 
name, but those who did acts of righteousness 
and mercy, should enter into the kingdom of his 
Father. His religion was not Jewish, but human, 
and the title he loved best was the Son of man, — 
the man of men, — the one in whom humanity 
fully appears. 

Thirdly. He calls himself " the Way, the 
Truth, and the Life;" he sa}^s, "For this end 
was I born, and for this cause came I into the 
world, — to bear witness to the truth." He bears 
witness to what he has seen of the Divine laws, 
— to what he not only thinks or believes, but 
knows. We can therefore rely on his authority, 
for it is the authority of insight and knowledge. 
He speaks what he knows, and testifies to what he 
has seen. He saw, with the inward eye of inspi- 
ration, the facts and laws of the spiritual world, 
as we see with the outward eye the facts of the 
physical world. He could no more be mistaken 
about the one than we can be about the other. 
There are some things we all know infallibly, 



CHRIST AND CHRISTIANITY. 45 

about which we are certain. I know that I exist, 
that you exist, that I am here to-night speaking 
to you. Authority accompanies knowledge always. 
The man who knows any thing becomes necessarily 
a leader in his department, and all take him as an 
authority. There is no hesitation in his tone, no 
theorizing in his statements, no confusion in his 
speech, no cloud on his thought. And just so 
Jesus speaks of spiritual things. When he sa} T s, 
"Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the 
kingdom of he ay en," he is stating a law of God's 
universe. When he says, " Not a sparrow falls 
to the ground without your Father," he states 
another law. Because the world recognizes in 
him this perfect insight, this clear vision, this 
infallible intuition of truth, it accepts him as its 
prophet, and sits at his feet as the great teacher 
of the race. 

Fourthly. He came to bring sinners to God, 
to bring pardon for sin, to make those who were 
afar off nigh, and to fill the human heart with a 
serene and blessed peace. This is his atoning or 
priestly work. I care not for any of the theories 
about it, — I think them inadequate. I do not 
think, as the orthodox doctrine taught for the 
first thousand years, that Christ died to pay a 



46 CHRIST AND CHRISTIANITY. 

ransom due to the devil ; nor, as was taught for 
the next five hundred years, that he died to pay a 
debt due to God ; nor that he was a sacrifice in 
the Jewish sense of a sacrifice. I believe more 
than all this ; in an atonement larger, deeper, 
more universal, more in accordance with all 
Christ's teachings and the infinite love of God. 
I believe that Jesus, first of all men, clearly saw, 
and alone among men has fully declared, the in- 
finite pardoning love of God to the sinner. He 
indeed teaches that God, when revealing himself 
in law, makes a perpetual distinction between 
right and w r rong, good and evil ; that every 
man must reap as he sows ; be rewarded and 
punished in this world, and in all worlds, ac- 
cording to his deed ; be judged by his works ; 
and, according to his practical fidelity, be ruler 
over five or ten cities ; according to his practical 
infidelity, go into outer darkness. This eternal 
law of God, Jesus does not destroy, but fulfils, — 
carries out to its ultimates. But, meantime, he 
reveals the other side of divinity, showing the 
infinite tenderness and compassion of God, which 
makes no difference among his children, except 
this : that he cares most for those who need him 
most, so that there is more joy in heaven over 



CHRIST AND CHRISTIANITY. 47 

one sinner that repenteth than over ninety and 
nine just persons who need no repentance. 
Christ's death did not produce this love, or make 
it possible for God to pardon sinners ; but it 
revealed it. It showed that this love, binding the 
highest to the lowest, is the reconciling power 
in the universe, — the great atonement by which 
evil can be fully overcome by good. 

While law divides and establishes a vast order 
of rank, power, position, love unites and pene- 
trates all this majestic hierarchy with a divine 
attraction. Law unfolds the power of God, and 
displays his glory in creation. Love holds to- 
gether in safety this infinite universe, and makes 
it all one. 

This is the great atonement, which is taught 
everywhere in the doctrine of free grace, by which 
thousands and tens of thousands of sinners are 
brought to God. And this was, is, and will be 
the very centre of Christian revelation, — law 
made at one with love. And this great doctrine 
of the overcoming, all-conquering, omnipresent 
power of divine love to redeem the lowest and 
save the most abandoned, and lift the most for- 
lorn, — this is nowhere taught as in the New Tes- 
tament, and there only is fully reconciled with the 
equal omnipresence of divine law. 



48 CHRIST AND CHRISTIANITY. 

In my first chapter, I spoke of a soldier who, 
about to die, refused to say that he repented, or 
that he believed the atonement, because he thought 
if he did, it might be merely from fear of future 
punishment. Of course, I believe that sincere re- 
pentance is always necessary ; and that whenever 
a man sees that he is going wrong, whether on the 
death-bed or at any other time, he ought to repent. 
He should turn from wrong to right : first inwardly, 
in his soul ; then outwardly, in his conduct. But 
I commended the soldier for this : that he pre- 
ferred to trust himself to God as he was, rather 
than to profess repentance and faith when he was 
not sure that he did repent or believe. 

And, fifthly, I believe Jesus to have been Son 
of God, and Divine, — because filled full of 
the Divine truth and love, and alwaj^s abiding 
therein. He alone, of the sons of men, was 
always resting on the Infinite love. He has sent 
the same spirit, in less degree, into the world, and 
enabled us all to say, " Our Father. " His divinity 
did not consist in any technical or metaphysical 
deity of person, but in living in constant com- 
munion with God, so as to be a perpetual mani- 
festation of the Divine truth and love. He is the 
unclouded mirror which reflects into the world the 



CHRIST AND CHRISTIANITY. 49 

glory and beauty of the Almighty. Therefore, 
we all, beholding as in a glass the glory of God, 
are changed into the same image from glory to 
greater glory. Christ's divinity consists in being 
the image of the unseen God, — of God manifest 
in a man. God is manifest in Nature ; he is 
also manifest in Providence, in history, in the 
intuitions of the soul. But in Jesus God speaks 
to us through human lips and a human life ; and 
so, by our brother man, brings us to himself. 

This, very briefly and imperfectly stated, is the 
truth I have been able to see in the supernatural 
view of Christ and Christianity, — dropping the 
non-essentials and retaining the essentials. 

Turn now to the opposite doctrine, which stands 
at the other extreme of thought, which rejects the 
whole system of orthodoxy, and with it rejects 
also Christianity, and loses faith in the sublime 
personality of Jesus. 

What shall we sa}' of this ? 

It will not do to say, as is commonly said, that 
all such doubts and denials proceed from an evil 
heart of unbelief. I have seen and known numer- 
ous infidels in all parts of the land, and know that 
among them are many of the most upright and 
conscientious of men, whose lives would be a 

4 



50 CHRIST AND CHRISTIANITY. 

credit to an3 T Christian church. What causes 
such men as these to become aliens to Christ ? I 
think that their rejection of Christianity often 
comes from mistakes of the Church itself in mak- 
ing non-essentials into essentials, and constituting 
those doctrines a part of Christianity which do 
not really belong to it. For example, the} r object 
to supernaturalism, but to what kind? It is to 
Christianity, when considered as an interruption 
of the order of things, — an interference by the 
Almighty, to cure the evils which had come into 
the world. This sort of supernaturalism has 
been taught by theology, but where is it taught 
by Christ or his apostles ? With them Christian- 
ity is no such temporary expedient, no after- 
thought, but was in the beginning with God, was 
before Abraham, was foreordained before the 
foundation of the world. The supernaturalism 
of the New Testament tells us of that Infinite 
Creator who, above nature, is for ever pouring his 
life into nature, " from whom, and through whom, 
and to whom are all things." Christ and Chris- 
tian^ were the supplement of all that went before, 
coming in the fulness of time, prepared for by 
all past history, announced by all past prophecy, 
and taking their place on the stage of being in 



CIIJRIST AND CHRISTIANITY. 51 

accordance with universal law. And with this 
true supernaturalism true naturalism can have no 
quarrel. 

Again, naturalism objects to the Miracles of 
the New Testament ; but only to miracles when 
considered as violations of the laws of Nature, or 
considered as evidences of truth. But these defi- 
nitions are the explanations of theology, not of 
the Xew Testament. The miracles of Christ are 
never called violations of law, but rather wonder- 
ful actions showing wonderful power. They are 
" single examples," as has been well said, ;c of 
laws boundless as the universe." And, so far 
from using miracles as proofs of his truth, Jesus 
rebukes those who asked for such evidence ; say- 
ing, U A wicked generation seeks for a sign, and 
no sign shall be given it." He also appears to 
teach, in his parable of the rich man and Lazarus, 
that one who is not convinced by the truth without 
a miracle, cannot be convinced by a miracle. The 
rich man, pleading for his brothers, says: "If 
one went from the dead to speak to them, they 
would repent." To this Father Abraham is made 
to reply : " If the}' hear not Moses and the proph- 
ets, neither would the}' be persuaded though one 
went from the dead." That a beino* endowed with 



52 CHRIST AND CHRISTIANITY. 

such exceptional power as Jesus should have per- 
formed wonderful works, naturalism cannot rea- 
sonably deny. But naturalism is right in main- 
taining that the God of Nature will not violate 
his own laws. 

And, again, naturalism objects, and justly, to 
any conception of the divinity of Christ which 
makes it physical instead of moral. Christ is not 
divine by manifesting the omnipotence and omni- 
presence of God in the physical universe, for this 
was not his mission. He was divine in revealing 
the spiritual laws of God, and becoming a media- 
tor of the divine love and truth. The Moral Law 
came by Moses ; physical laws come by science ; 
but grace and truth have come by Jesus Christ. 

A shallow naturalism and a narrow theology 
may be at war ; but a true science and a broad 
Christianity lend to each other a helping hand. 
When the world was believed to be in the centre 
of the universe, and all the stars to revolve 
around it every day, man, with his weakness, his 
ignorance, his feeble aspiration and faith, was 
also made the central object in creation. But 
how much nobler an idea we now have of the First 
Cause, who rules the immensities and eternities 
revealed by modern science ! How theology is 



CHRIST AND CHRISTIANITY. 53 

purified and elevated by every new access of truth ! 
All this progress of the human mind only makes 
Christ seem greater, and Christianity more noble. 
A higher Christian doctrine is to come, for the 
Spirit is to lead the world on from truth to truth. 
A broader, more inclusive Christian faith is to 
elevate mankind. We are only now at the thresh- 
old of the great Christian temple which is to be. 
Christ is to be lifted up, and so to draw all men 
unto him. If Christianity shall ever die, it will 
only die as Jesus himself died, when it has fin- 
ished the work given it to do. Only " when all 
things are subject unto him, shall the Son himself 
be made subject to him who did put all things 
under him, that God may be all in all." 

What God has joined together let no man put 
asunder. God has joined together reason and re- 
ligion, responsibility and freedom, faith and works, 
scientific progress and spiritual growth, the love 
of God and the love of man. Jesus, who is both 
Son of God and Son of man, is the natural leader 
of the. human race. On the loftiest summit which 
the reason can climb, we still find him. In the 
lowest depths of human sorrow and sin, this great 
friend is still by our side. When our e} T es close 
to all earthly sights, this divine brother is near us, 



54 CHRIST AND CHRISTIANITY. 

to sustain and cheer with a hope full of immor- 
tality. As the world advances on the vast high- 
way of progress, Christ will not become less 
human or less divine, but more so. 

Sometimes, in reading the New Testament, I 
find the proof of the inspiration of the writer not 
only in the grandeur, but also in the subtlety of 
his thought. One instance of this is in the ad- 
vice of the Apostle Paul to those scrupulous and 
somewhat narrow Christians in Corinth, who 
would not bu} r a piece of meat in the market 
until they had made sure that it had not come 
from the altar of Aphrodite or Zeus, where it had 
been laid as an offering. These punctilious Chris- 
tians would not touch the meat which had been 
once put upon the altar of an idol. The liberal 
Christians in Corinth ridiculed them for this, and 
laughed at all such narrowness. Paul said : " Let 
not him that eateth despise him that eateth not ; 
and let not him that eateth not judge him that 
eateth." The keenness of his intuition made the 
apostle select the precise words which in all times 
express the feelings with which orthodox Chris- 
tians and liberal Christians are ar5t to regard each 
other. Narrowness judges breadth ; breadth de- 
spises narrowness. The man who considers him- 



CHRIST AND CHRISTIANITY. 55 

self an advanced thinker looks with contempt on 
what seems to him stupid conservatism. The 
servant of the letter, on the other hand, denounces 
as an infidel and a heretic whoever walks in the 
freedom of the spirit. 

Let us not judge each other, and let us not de- 
spise each other, but open our hearts to all the 
light and love which God shall. send to us, know- 
ing that we shall all stand before the judgment- 
seat of the eternal truth of God. When there, 
we shall have little cause to be proud, whether of 
our orthodox opinions or of our rational Christi- 
anity, but shall be grateful if God has helped us 
to be any thing or to do any thing for him. 



III. 

THE BIBLE. 

WHAT is the Bible, and Where did it come 
from ? « ' The Bible " means ' ' The Book," 
and it is " The Book of books." No other, 
scriptures of man compare with it for wide, deep, 
and ever-growing influence. It is the highest 
work of its class, — that is, of the sacred writings 
of mankind, and these sacred writings are, among 
all other writings, the most important and influ- 
ential. 

Every commanding race, every vast civilization, 
has been directed and controlled by its sacred 
writings. The hundred and fifty millions of 
Hindoos have been ruled, during twenty-five cen- 
turies, b}' their Vedas and Puranas. Chinese 
civilization has taken its stamp from l ' The Kings " 
and the " Four Books." The brilliant career of 
the Persian empire was inspired throughout by 
the Zend-Avesta. The tribes of Arabia were 
gathered, moulded, banded, and wielded in a 
resistless tide of conquest, by the Koran. The 



58 THE BIBLE. 

sacred books of the Buddhists have been the 
leaven of civilization among a third part of the 
human race during a vast period of time. If we 
judge them by their influence, these are the great 
books of the human race. But, for various rea- 
sons, the Bible stands above them all. The others 
are the books of particular races, — of the Hindoos 
only, or the Mongols, or the Persians, or the 
.Chinese ; but the Bible has a constituency com- 
posed of all the races of the world. The others 
belong to decaying, arrested, or dead civilizations ; 
the Bible, to the advancing and all- conquering 
races, who stand for the highest civilization at- 
tained on this planet. The others are either 
narrow or shallow in some directions : the Bible 
is a fountain whose waters feed intellect, heart, 
life ; promoting the highest worship as well as the 
largest humanity. This supreme value of the Bi- 
ble has been recognized by thinkers of all schools. 
Walter Scott expresses the orthodox idea in the 
lines which he puts in the mouth of the White 
Lady of Avenel : — 

" Within this awful volume lies 
The mystery of mysteries. 
Happiest they of human race 
To whom our God hath granted grace 



THE BIBLE. 59 

To read, to bear, to hope, to pray, 
To lift the latch and force the way ; 
But Letter had he ne'er been born 
Who reads to doubt or reads to scorn. " 

Another writer, who is not usually supposed to 
reverence the Bible too much, — Theodore Parker, 
— thus speaks of it. I gladly quote his words 
to show that he is not that merely destructive 
radical he is often believed to be : " This collec- 
tion of books has taken such a hold on the world 
as no other. The literature of Greece, which goes 
up like incense from that land of temples and 
heroic deeds, has not half the influence of this 
book from a nation alike despised in ancient and 
modern times. It is read of a Sabbath in all the 
ten thousand pulpits of our land. In all the tem- 
ples of Christendom, its voice is lifted up, week by 
week. The sun never sets on its gleaming page. 
It goes equally to the cottage of the plain man 
and the palace of the king. It is woven into the 
literature of the scholar, and colors the talk of the 
street. ... It blesses us when we are born, gives 
names to half Christendom, rejoices with us, has 
sympathy with our sorrowing, tempers our grief 
to finer issues. . . . Xow for such effects there 
must be an adequate cause. That nothing comes 



60 THE BIBLE. 

of nothing is true all the world over. It is no light 
thing to hold, with an electric chain, a thousand 
hearts, though but an hour. What is it, then, to 
hold the Christian world, and that for centuries ? 
. . . Some thousand famous writers come up in 
this century, to be forgotten in the next. But 
the silver cord of the Bible is not loosed, nor 
its golden bowl broken, as tens of centuries go 
by. . . . There must be in the Bible mind, heart, 
sonl, wisdom, and religion. Were it otherwise, 
how could millions find it their lawgiver, friend, 
and prophet? Some of the greatest of human 
institutions seem built on the Bible : such things 
will not stand on heaps of chaff, but on moun- 
tains of rock." (Discourse of Religion, pp. 
302-304.) 

If, then, we ask, " What is the Bible?" the an- 
swer is, " The Word of God." But this answer 
takes two shapes, which I am now to consider. 

One answer — and that the most common in the 
Protestant church — says : It is " the Word," by 
being inspired throughout by God, in every book, 
every page, eveiy chapter, every verse, every 
word. It is infallible all through. Eveiy part is 
consistent with every other part, and with all 
truth. If it contradicts astronomy or geology, so 



THE BIBLE. 61 

much the worse for them. If it contradicts his- 
toric monuments and records, then they are false. 
If it seems to contradict itself, this is only in 
appearance. It is the Word of God throughout, — 
from Genesis to Revelation ; and ' ' better had he 
ne'er been born, who reads to doubt" a word of 
any part of it, from Genesis to Revelation. This 
is the theory of infallible verbal inspiration. 

The other answer to the question, " How is the 
Bible the Word of God?" is that it is filled with 
the Spirit of God. As we read the Old Testa- 
ment, we everywhere feel the presence of divine 
power and justice ruling the world. The world 
and its affairs are all guided and governed by 
God, who will reward good and punish evil. It is 
a revelation eveiy where of Divine law. As we 
read the New Testament, we are in the presence 
of a heavenly Father of an infinite tenderness, 
who pours blessings on the good and the evil, and 
desires to save eveiy child. The Old Testament 
is inspired by the sense of Divine law, the New 
Testament by the sense of Divine love. 

But its unity, its sacreclness, its power, is of 
the spirit, not the letter. There is no infallibility 
about its geology, astronomy, or history ; but its 
spirit is everywhere one. This spirit is developed 



62 THE BIBLE. 

more and more from the earliest to the latest 
books. The Old Testament grows more spiritual 
in the Psalms and Prophets than in Kings and 
Chronicles. The New Testament comes to fulfil 
the Old, — not to contradict it, but to complete it. 
The summit is reached in the life and words of 
Jesus, which are full of the highest truth. 

In order to discover which of these views is the 
true one, we must see where the Bible came from. 
Our Bible is the English Bible. But the English 
Bible is a translation, for the Bible was written 
originally in Hebrew and Greek. Therefore, if 
the doctrine of verbal inspiration is true, not only 
must the authors have been miraculously preserved 
from error, but the translators also. Our present 
English Bible is a translation (called the Author- 
ized Version) , made by lift}'- four scholars by the 
command of James the First. They were not 
left free to translate according to their conscience 
and knowledge, but were ordered to follow certain 
rules. The}' were not allowed to make a new 
translation, but only to correct an older one. 
The} r took the libert} r of translating the same 
Hebrew or Greek word sometimes b}^ one English 
word, and sometimes b} T another. And now we 
ask whether they were infallibly inspired always 



THE BIBLE. G3 

to choose the right word in their translation? No 
one pretends that the}' were ; but, if not, the 
whole theory of infallible verbal inspiration falls 
to the ground. 

Take, for example, the Greek words, "krima" 
and "krisis," which are translated in our Bible 
sometimes " judgment, " sometimes "condemna- 
tion," and sometimes " damnation." Our English 
Bible makes Paul say that he who eats the Lord's 
Supper unworthily " eats and drinks damnation to 
himself." But it does not make Jesus say, " For 
damnation I have come into the world ; " but, 
" For judgment I have come into the world ; " and 
yet the word is the same. Our translation does 
not translate, " This is the damnation, that light 
has come into the world ; " but, " This is the con- 
demnation." Here, too, the word is the same. 
So the word l ' hades " is translated in one place 
"the grave," and in other places "hell." If, 
therefore, we are to consider our English Bible 
verbally inspired, then the translators must have 
been inspired to decide whether in such texts it is 
hell that is spoken of, or only the grave. But, as 
no one believes this, it is certain that our English 
Bible, at any rate, cannot be verbally inspired. 

How is it, then, with the Greek or Hebrew Bi- 



64 THE BIBLE. 

ble, from which they translate it? As the books 
of the" New Testament were written in the first 
and second century, and as printing was not dis- 
covered till the middle of the fifteenth centuiy, it is 
evident that these books were copied in writing by 
scribes during thirteen or fourteen hundred years. 
Were these copyists all infallibly inspired, so as to 
make no mistakes ? Certainly not ; for then the 
manuscripts now extant would not differ from 
each other as the}' do. In the 1,500 manuscripts 
of the whole or parts of the New Testament 
which have been compared together, more than a 
hundred thousand various readings have been 
found, — mostly unimportant, but some of great 
consequence. Now, unless some one is infallibly 
inspired to distinguish between these various read- 
ings, we cannot have a verbally inspired Bible. 
If } T ou open your New Testament at 1 John v. 7, 
you will find the following verse : ' ' There are 
three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the 
Word, and the Holy Ghost, and these three are 
one." This passage is the only one in the New 
Testament in which the doctrine of the Trinity 
seems to be plainly taught. And this passage is 
wanting in all the Greek manuscripts except two 
modern ones ; in all the ancient versions ; even in 



THE BIBLE. 65 

the copies of the Vulgate, before the tenth cen- 
tury ; in all the Church Fathers, — even those 
who were discussing the Trinity, and who quoted 
the verses before it and after it ; and is now uni- 
versally admitted to be no part of the Epistle of 
John. Yet it stands in all our English Bibles, 
and is read and quoted as if it were a part of the 
inspired Word. 

But let us suppose that somehow we have cer- 
tainly possessed ourselves of the original text of 
the inspired writers : there is still another ques- 
tion. Who collected the books of the Old and 
New Testament, and decided that these were the 
inspired writers? In other words, who fixed the 
canon? Who was infallibly authorized to say 
that these particular books, and no others, out of 
all Jewish and Christian literature, should be put 
together in the Bible ? The answer is, No one. 
The Bible was not thus formed. It came together 
gradually, on the principle of the survival of the 
fittest. Books which were at first a part of the 
Bible dropped out of it. Others, which were 
rejected by many at first, have finally become 
established in the canon as a part of the sacred 
Scriptures. 

Not long ago, in the convent of St. Catherine 

5 



66 THE BIBLE. 

on Mount Sinai, a Russian scholar discovered an 
ancient MS. of the New Testament, which proved 
to be the oldest known. It goes back to the 
fourth century, and one way by which its age is 
determined is that it contains, among the other 
books, the Epistle of Barnabas, which ceased to 
be a part of the New Testament after the fourth 
century. Barnabas was the companion of Paul, 
and is called a prophet in the New Testament, 
and is said to be a good man, full of the Holy 
Ghost and of faith: He was sent to Jerusalem 
with Paul to attend the first Christian council. 
He joined the church at the very first, and showed 
his zeal by selling his land and giving the proceeds 
to his needy fellow Christians. He introduced 
Paul to the church, went with him on his mission- 
ary journeys, and is called an apostle in the New 
Testament. Now, an epistle, believed to have 
been written by him, was, for this reason, put 
among the Scriptures of the New Covenant, and 
remained in them two or three hundred years. 
Then it dropped out, — and, if 3^011 wish to know 
why, read it and you will see. Not because of 
any doubts entertained in those days of its authen- 
ticity, for it was repeatedly quoted by Clement 
and Origen as a genuine work of Barnabas. But 



THE BIBLE. 67 

it is full of tasteless allegories, — it has no weight, 
no substance, — and evidently it was left out of 
the New Testament because it was not fit to stay 
in. What books belong to the New Testament 
has not been settled even now. The Roman 
Catholic church puts into the Bible the Old Testa- 
ment Apociypha, which most Protestants reject. 
Criticism has not definitely settled in regard to 
two or three of the books of the New Testament, 
whether they are genuine. How, then, can we 
pretend that every part of the present Bible is in- 
fallibly the Word of God? 

Another objection to this doctrine of verbal 
inspiration is that it repels many persons from 
Christianity, and is the cause of much infidelity. 
There are often honest and intelligent men who 
cannot receive the geology or astronomy of the 
Book of Genesis, or many of the miracles of the 
Bible. The}' are told that if they do not believe 
that Joshua stopped the sun in his course, and 
that the whale swallowed Jonah, they have no 
right to believe in Jesus Christ. So they are re- 
jected from Christianity. One remarkable illus- 
tration of this is to be found in the French 
philosopher Rousseau, whose name has been iden- 
tified with infidelity, when he was, in truth, the 



68 THE BIBLE. 

most religious man among the great thinkers oi 
his own time and land. In his book on education, 
" Emile," he gives his creed in regard to Christ. 
He puts Christ far above all other teachers the 
world has seen, and is ready to accept him as his 
master in religion, because of his wonderful life 
and death. " Do not compare him with Socrates,'' 
he cries. " Socrates died like a philosopher : Je- 
sus died like a God." As to his miracles, says 
Rousseau, I can neither receive them as facts, nor 
can I reject them. I admit my ignorance con- 
cerning them, — they may have been true, — only 
I cannot say that I believe them. But I can be- 
lieve in Christ on other grounds, — because of his 
wonderful character and marvellous teaching. On 
these grounds I can be a Christian. But this was 
not considered sufficient by the church, and he was 
banished from France because of this book and 
these statements. He w r ent to Switzerland, and 
there, in a small town, in Neufchatel, found a lit- 
tle Protestant church, which received him on his 
own grounds, and there he had a religious home, 
and partook with them of the Lord's Supper. 

At the beginning of my ministry, I had a church 
in Kentucky. There I found many persons who 
were reputed to be infidels, and thought them- 



THE BIBLE. 69 

selves so, and whose influence was against Chris- 
tianity, simply because they could not accept the 
verbal inspiration of the whole Bible. One man 
I knew, one of the best of men, upright and 
honorable, benevolent and kind, who was called 
an infidel. When I asked him about it, he said, 
u Yes, I have thought myself so, and for this rea- 
son, — when I was young, I heard a minister say, 
taking a Bible in his hand, ' Every thing between 
these lids is the Word of God, and if you do not 
believe it you will be damned.' I said, ' If this 
is Christianity, I must be an infidel.' But now I 
have changed my mind. I do not think that 
Christianity requires me to believe every word in 
the Bible, and so I can gladly be a Christian." 

Why, then, is this doctrine of the infallible 
verbal inspiration of the Bible still maintained? 
Not because the Scripture itself claims any such 
infallibility : it does not. It is indeed said that 
" all Scripture is given b} r inspiration," but not 
that this inspiration is infallible. Inspiration is 
one thing, infallibility another. The great poets, 
Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, are called inspired, 
and truly, because they have an inward illumina- 
tion which shows them forms of truth and beauty 
and goodness unseen by common men. But this 



70 THE BIBLE. 

inspiration does not preserve them from mistakes. 
It does not make them infallible. Take the four 
Gospels and compare them with each other. One 
spirit, one life, pervades them all : it is the life 
of Christ. But they frequently contradict each 
other in details. If you demand verbal and 
minute accuracy, their whole story falls to the 
ground, and we lose our Master. They differ 
from each other openly and frankly all the way 
through as regards outward incidents. But, as to 
the substance of the story, they are one. They 
differ as to the details of Christ's resurrection, but 
that he really rose from the dead they are fully 
agreed. If it is necessaiy, in order to believe 
Christianity, to have verbal accuracy in the Scrip- 
tures, one cannot believe Christianity at all, for 
the Scriptures cannot be verbally accurate when 
they differ even in unimportant minutiae. But it is 
not necessar}^. What we need is to be certain as to 
the main facts of Christ's life, teaching, and char- 
acter. And we can be certain of these, just as 
we are certain of the main facts in the life and 
character of Alexander the Great, Dr. Franklin, 
Julius Caesar, General Washington. No one pre- 
tends that those writers from whom we derive our 
information concerning such persons were infal- 



THE BIBLE, 71 

libly inspired, yet we are at least as sure of the 
main facts of their lives and character as we are 
of the main facts of the life of Abraham, Samuel, 
or David. AVe are more sure that Julius Caesar 
crossed the Rubicon on his way to Rome, and 
that Dr. Franklin was in London before the Revo- 
lution, than that Jesus went to Jerusalem at 
the beginning of his ministry ; for all writers are 
agreed as to the one, and the four Evangelists are 
not agreed as to the other. 

Many arguments have been brought to prove 
the theory of verbal inspiration, some of them 
very ingenious. But the difficulty with them all 
is that they merely aim at showing that the Bible 
ought to be verbally inspired, not that it is so. 
The fact remains that it is not so inspired, since 
it is in some places opposed to science, in others 
to history, and in others to itself. One curious 
fact shows that this doctrine is supported by the 
fear that, if a single verse of the Bible is admitted 
to be unsound, the authorit} 7 of the whole will 
be gone. Scholars of all denominations admit 
that there are mistranslations and interpolations 
in our Bible which ought not to be there. Some 
years ago, the Committee on Versions of the Amer- 
ican Bible Society, containing eminent scholars, all 



72 . TEE BIBLE. 

of orthodox denominations, prepared an amended 
edition of the English version. They did not 
make a new translation, nor amend the errors of 
the old one, nor even improve the text where it is 
admitted to be faulty. They only corrected some 
palpable misprints, and altered the headings of 
the chapters where these are incomplete or false, 
or where they are, in reality, comments on the 
Scripture. This amended version, indorsed by 
the secretaries, and adopted by the Board of Man- 
agers, was printed and circulated by them during 
seven years, and was then suppressed. This was 
done in consequence of a clamor, raised not 
merely by the ignorant, but in which even Reviews, 
Ecclesiastical Bodies, and Auxiliar}' Societies, did 
not hesitate to join. I asked one of the gentle- 
men, who was a member of the committee, why 
this was done ; and he said that it was owing to 
the fear that, if we once began to make corrections 
in the Bible, the people might lose their faith in 
it, altogether. 

It is said, " Unless we believe the Scriptures 
infallibly true, there can be no authority ; and we 
need some authority to rest upon, otherwise all 
will become uncertain : and then there will be no 
firm convictions about any thing." I admit that 



TEE BIBLE. 73 

we want firm religious convictions. I go further : 
I say we need to know spiritual things just as 
we know natural things. But I contend that the 
belief in a verbal inspiration does not give us 
that knowledge, but rather hinders it. I also 
maintain that we need to trust in the authority of 
Jesus. It is an immense help to have confidence 
in him as the way, the truth, and the life. But 
to trust in the authority of a teacher is not knowl- 
edge : it is only the door to knowledge. You 
send 3'our child to school, and it is right that he 
should trust in the teacher's authority and take 
what is taught on that authority. But, if it ends 
there, he has not learned any thing. Until he 
has made his teacher's instruction a harmonious 
part of his own knowledge, he does not know. 

Authority is a door by which we enter the 
vast temple of truth. It is a guide who leads us 
through the wilderness to the Promised Land. 
But there its work ends. It does not give us 
knowledge, — only the access to knowledge. The 
true authority of the Scripture is this, that it is 
a book made sacred by the love and respect of 
many generations, — a book which has brought 
comfort and joy to thousands and tens of thou- 
sands of hearts, — which has been the means of 



74 THE BIBLE. 

converting sinners and of edifying saints. Hence 
we ought to approach it with trust, expectation, 
confidence, and read it to find what it has to 
teach us, — seeking for the spirit of life and truth 
which is in it. But, to have this faith in the Bible 
as full of truth, it is not necessary to believe in 
its perfect accuracy in every respect, nor that it 
has been preserved by a miracle from all error. 
No one believes that Humboldt was infallibly 
inspired ; but what authority his words cany ! 
No one believes that La Place was infallibly in- 
spired to write the u Mecanique Celeste." It has 
been said that in America not five men can under- 
stand it ; yet his views of the universe are accepted 
by all. No one believes the " Nautical Almanac " 
an inspired book ; but it is such an authority that 
thousands of vessels trust themselves to its calcu- 
lations, and thousands of lives and millions of 
property are confided to its accurac}\ 

The true inspiration of the Bible is not of the 
letter, but of the spirit. Until we have caught 
that spirit, all the dogmas of its inspiration avail 
nothing. When we have that, we do not need 
them. The spirit of the Bible is one all through. 
From Genesis to Revelation, there is a sense of 
the power of God. It all brings us near to him. 



THE BIBLE. 75 

Every thing is looked at as if he were near by. 
The book of Genesis teaches that God is the 
creator of all things. The Persians said that 
the stars and planets were gods. Genesis sa}'s : 
" God made them all." The Eg}^ptians said that 
plants and animals were gods. Genesis says : 
" God said, Let the earth bring forth herbs and 
animals." It does not teach geology, but mono- 
theism. 

Pass on to the stories of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, 
Joseph. What inspiration is there in these? you 
ask. Of the letter, none ; but there is the spirit of 
trust in a providence, near by, guiding human feet 
evermore. Come down to David. He was a fierce 
soldier, a wild, passionate man, with many faults ; 
but amid them all there was a love of right and 
goodness ; there was a profound sorrow for his 
sins, and a perfect trust in God. When David, 
tending his sheep on the hillsides of Judaea, sang 
his song of trust, and said, "The Lord is my 
shepherd," the Divine inspiration taught him a 
strain which will echo through all time. 

Then turn to the prophets. They were stern 
and solemn figures, — awful and venerable shapes,- 
— ' ' going in the heat and bitterness of their 
spirit." But they were firmly convinced of the 



76 THE BIBLE. 

ever-present Divine power. They stood like a 
rock, hoping against hope. They cry out to a 
backsliding people, " Seek ye the Lord while he 
may be found." "It is he who hath measured 
the waters with a span, and comprehended the 
dust of the earth in a measure." This is the in- 
spiration of the Old Testament. It is Divine 
power around us all, and Divine law above us all, 
and Divine providence guiding us all. 

In the New Testament, there comes another 
sense of sunny piety, — a happy atmosphere of 
heavenly love. Listen to Jesus: "Not a spar- 
row falls to the ground without } T our Father ; and 
ye are of more value than many sparrows." 

"Be ye children of your Father in heaven, 
who causes his sun to rise on the evil and the 
good; and sends his rain on the just and the 
unjust." 

"Consider the lilies how they grow." "If 
God so clothe the grass of the field, how much 
more will he clothe you." 

" I am the resurrection and the life. He that 
believes in me " — that is, who accepts my truth 
and trusts in my word — " shall never die." He 
does not die : death is nothing to him. He passes 
on and up. 



THE BIBLE. 77 



c i Neither do I condemn thee ; go and sin no 



more." 



" What man among you being a father, if his 
son ask bread, will give him a stone? How much 
more shall your heavenly Father give his holy 
spirit to those that ask him." 

Is a theory of plenary inspiration necessary to 
enable us to believe the Sermon on the Mount or 
to utter the Lord's Prayer? Are not such say- 
ings their own authority? And what did Paul 
mean when he said, " God has made us able min- 
isters of the New Testament, not of the letter, but 
of the spirit, for the letter killeth, but the spirit 
giveth life" ? What did he mean but exactly 
what I have been contending for here? Do I 
need any theory of verbal inspiration to be satis- 
fied that he was filled by a Divine spirit when he 
said : "I am persuaded that neither death nor 
life, nor things present, nor things to come, can 
separate me from the love of God in Jesus 
Christ"? 

Peter and James and John are not repetitions 
of Paul : they all speak in their own language, 
but one spirit runs through them all. When John 
says, " He that loveth dwelleth in God;" w T hen 
James says, u Pure religion is to visit the father- 



78 THE BIBLE. 

less, and to keep one's self unspotted from the 
world," — they said the same thing which Paul 
said in declaring that " Love is the fulfilling of 
the Law," and that Love is greater even than 
Faith or Hope. And all agree with the great 
words of Christ, when he taught that the chief 
commandment is to love God and love man. 

The spirit of the Bible is one : there is no con- 
tradiction, no opposition there. But when Paul 
says, " The letter killeth," he utters a solemn 
warning ; for care for the letter has alwaj^s 
brought a chill of death to the soul. 

It is not, then, because we wish to have less 
respect felt for the Bible that we oppose this theory 
of the letter, but because we wish more. If this 
whole theory were dropped, we should, as I am 
convinced, enter far more into the spirit of the 
Bible. The Bible would then no more be re- 
garded merely as a master, but rather as a friend. 
Multitudes, now repelled, would be attracted 
toward it, and the Bible might say to Christian 
believers, as Jesus said : " I call you not servants," 
blindly obedient to an unintelligible command ; 
" but I call you friends," intelligently obeying 
what you see to be right, intelligently accepting 
what you see to be true, and able to comprehend 



THE BIBLE. 79 

what is the length and breadth and depth and 
height of the love of God. 

The power of the Bible is not in its letter, but 
its spirit. That spirit needs no support from 
dogmas or theories of a supposed infallibility. The 
Bible may be proved full of errors as regards 
science, — often wrong in its chronology and 
histoiy. Its saints may be very imperfect char- 
acters ; its prophets, mistaken in their predic- 
tions ; its apostles, men of like passions with 
ourselves, and sometimes going astray. It may 
be true of them, as the} T said of themselves : 
"We have this treasure in earthen vessels, that 
the excellency of the power may be of God, and 
not of us." But what is the chaff to the wheat? 
The power of the Bible is that it brings God to 
man, and lifts man to God ; that it shows a provi- 
dence reaching through all histoiy, and whose 
everlasting arms are below all things ; a Father, 
whose love comes down into the heart of every 
child, who cares for us all, and is the Saviour of 
all. The Holy Spirit which pervades this book is 
The Comforter, It brings us comfort in our sor- 
rows, light in our darkness, hope in our despair. 
When all the scaffoldings which surround the 
Bible are taken away, by which men have tried to 



80 THE BIBLE. 

prop it up, the world will begin truly to recognize 
its real glory. Kingdoms fall, institutions perish, 
civilizations change, human doctrines disappear ; 
but the imperishable truths which pervade and 
sanctify the Bible shall bear it up above the flood 
of change and the deluge of years. It will for 
ever remain 

" A sacred ark, which from the deeps 
Garners the life for worlds to be, 
And with its precious burden sweeps 
Adown dark time's destroying sea." 



IV. 



THE CHURCH AND WORSHIP, — WHAT IS TO 
BECOME OF THE CHURCH ? — ANSWERS OF 
THE SCEPTIC, THE SECTARIAN, AND THE 
BROAD CHURCHMAN. 

THE subject of this chapter is, "The Chris- 
tian Church, and what is to become of it?" 
And I shall consider three answers : the answer 
of the man who does not believe in the Christian 
church, — the sceptic; the answer of the secta- 
rian ; and the answer of the broad churchman. 
This question of what is to become of the Chris- 
tian church, connects itself with the general sub- 
ject of the essentials and non - essentials in 
Christianity ; because only that which is essen- 
tial in the church — if there is an}^ thing essential 
in the church — will be found remaining in the 
future. 

First, as to the sceptic. His answer is : " The 
days of the church have passed by. It is a dying 
institution. There will be no church in the future. 

6 



82 THE CHURCH AND WORSHIP. 

There will be no church," he continues, u because 
the foundations of the church have been completely 
undermined and overthrown. It has rested on the 
belief of its supernatural authority, as founded 
by God and Christ, and as essential to salvation. 
Its worship, its sacraments, its priests, have been 
believed necessary to save the soul. But this be- 
lief is passing by, and will soon be wholly gone. 
As the world grows more enlightened, its faith in 
this supernatural church and its authority passes 
away. In the coming years, there will be none 
so poor as to do it reverence. 

" Besides," argue these reformers and critics, 
4 4 what need is there of a church ? We do not 
need its worship, — we can pray to God, and 
worship him alone in our closet, or in the groves 
which were God's 4 first temples.' What need of 
listening to sermons, — we can read books, or 
hear lectures on science, literature, and art. 
What men want is knowledge, not ceremonies. 
Newspapers and magazines, lectures and colleges, 
are the teaching church of our time, to which 
all men go. Philanthropic societies and reform 
societies are the working church of this age." 

"The church is not wanted," continue our 
critics, " and is even in the way. It usually 



THE CHURCH AND WORSHIP. 83 

opposes progress, opposes reforms, or else wholly 
neglects them. It leaves the abolitionist to free 
the slave ; the temperance societies to reform the 
drunkard : it turns over the blind and the idiots 
to Dr. Howe ; the ignorant children to Horace 
Mann ; the insane to Dorothea Dix ; the prisoners 
to the Prison Discipline Society ; our suffering 
brute relatives to the Societ}^ for the Prevention 
of Cruelty to Animals. Every one of these re- 
forms lay directly in the way of the church, and 
it passed them by. The church should have 
preached deliverance to the captives, and eman- 
cipation to the slave ; the church should have 
preached knowledge for the people, should have 
earned help to the blind and deaf and insane 
and intemperate. It has notably failed in all 
these duties. Occupied with discussions about 
theology ; engaged in controversy about more or 
less water in baptism ; the exact consequences of 
Adam's sin ; the need of bishops to make a true 
church, or the proper sort of millinery to be worn by 
the priest, — it has omitted judgment, mercy, and 
faith. It cares more for anise and cummin than 
for love to God and man. In Europe, the Roman 
Catholic Church is to-day exerting all its power — 
as it always has done — to help the kings and the 



84 THE CHURCH AND WORSHIP. 

nobles and to keep down the people. In this 
country, there was one great overshadowing evil 
and wrong, — that of slavery, — and the church 
never did any thing to remove it, not even with 
the tip of its ringers. Away with such a church ! 
we do not need it, and will have none of it." 

I have stated this argument in its full force, for 
you can never satisfactorily meet an opponent, nor 
answer his objections, unless you first see and ad- 
mit their entire weight ; and I think we must con- 
cede that most Christian churches to-day greatly 
fail in this duty of curing the miseries, the wrongs, 
and the evils of the world. Occupied in making 
converts to a creed, or proselytes to a sect, or in 
awakening men to seek salvation from a future 
hell into a future heaven, thej^ have neglected the 
hells around them here and the heavens that might 
be brought down upon earth to-day. 

This is the account which Jesus gave of his 
mission, in his own town, in the presence of his 
friends and relatives, and at the beginning of his 
work : " The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, be- 
cause he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to 
the poor ; he hath sent me to preach deliverance 
to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind ; 
to set at liberty them that are bruised ; to preach 



THE CHURCH AND WORSHIP. 85 

the acceptable } T ear of the Lord." In our daily 
prayer, we are taught to pray that God's "will 
shall be done on earth." The work of Christ, as 
declared by himself, is to heal the woes and wrongs 
of this world ; to bring liberty instead of slavery, 
peace instead of war. The highest, noblest name 
ever given to the church was when the Apostle 
called it 4i the body of Christ." When Christ was 
in the world, he had his own earthly body, — his 
feet, with which to walk to and fro, doing good \ 
his friendly voice, speaking words of help and 
good will ; his blessed hands, touching to heal ; 
his eyes, full of love, looking on friends and foes 
with radiant benediction. Now he is no more 
here in outward form ; but his spirit is still here, 
and needs a body with which to act. The church 
is that bod}', — so sa} T s the Apostle : " Now ye are 
the body of Christ." Christ should look love, 
through the eyes of the church, on mankind ; 
should heal with the hands of the church ; the 
church should be his feet to go about doing good ; 
the church should be his voice speaking pardon 
and peace to the sinner. If it does not do this, 
it fails of its duty and neglects its work. 

But what then ? Shall we say that because it 
has not done all its work it must be abolished and 



86 THE CHURCH AND WORSHIP. 

destroyed? Here I think our friends the critics 
are mistaken. Manj^, many years ago, when the 
abolition movement was comparatively young, I 
went to Hingham to attend an anti-slavery meet- 
ing. Coming back in the steamer, it grounded on 
the flats in the harbor, and we were obliged to 
stay on board all night, waiting for the rising of 
the next tide. Having no room to sleep, we held 
meetings during the night. Frederick Douglass 
was on board, and in one of his speeches he 
denounced the indifference of the church to the 
wrongs of the slave ; and, calling it the bulwark 
of slavery, said that it must be broken down and 
destroyed before emancipation could come. I 
recollect replying that, admitting it was the bul- 
wark of slavery, it need not follow that it must 
be destro}'ed in order that freedom should come. 
When, after the campaign of Leipsic, the allied 
armies arrived at Paris, they found it defended by 
Marshal Marmont with an army planted on the 
hill of Montmartre. This hill was then the bul- 
wark of Paris. But the allied armies did not say, 
"We must destroy it; we must tear it down." 
No: the} r said, "Let us take it. Let us occupy 
it with our own troops." And thus, if the church 
were the bulwark of slavery, we did not need, and 



THE CHURCH AND WORSHIP. 87 

ought not to try, to destroy it, but rather take it 
and occupy it in behalf of freedom. That reason- 
ing still holds good. The church is a power, The 
roots of it are planted deep in the heart of man- 
kind. Grant that it is an imperfect institution. 
Let it then be improved. Others may .call it, if 
they will, the Bride of Christ, the ark of safety, 
the pure and holy mother of souls, the infallible 
and spotless bod}\ Let us rather name it, as 
Jesus did, a company of disciples, of children 
met to learn. The word disciple means simply a 
learner, a scholar. You do not blame a learner 
because he is ignorant. Ignorance is his qualifi- 
cation for learning. Christians may not be very 
wise nor very good ; but, if they are sitting at 
Christ's feet to learn of him. then they are his 
disciples and members of his church. Men and 
women of culture and leisure, with opportunities 
for reading, for social intercourse, educated in 
principles of virtue, surrounded from childhood 
by examples holding them to goodness, breathing 
an atmosphere saturated with Christian influences, 
may not so much feel the need of the Christian 
church to keep them from going astray. But let 
them look round on society, and judge what would 
be the consequences if the institutions of religion 
should disappear. 



88 THE CHURCH AND WORSHIP. 

By the census of 1870, it appeared that there 
were then in the United States 63,000 church 
edifices, with accommodations for 21,000,000 of 
people. In most of these churches, religious 
services are held every week. In 60,000 places 
in the United States, men and women and children 
assemble to recognize their relations to an infinite 
God, to be told of their obligations and duties, to 
listen to the words of the Bible. During one day 
in seven, the rushing tide of worldly cares is ar- 
rested, the hot struggle for wealth and power is 
calmed, and men look up out of time into eternity. 
In these 60,000 churches, people come together on 
the same broad platform of humanity, — the dis- 
tinctions of life are set aside in the presence of 
God ; parties, cliques, social separations have no 
place. Suppose all this to come to an end. The 
church fulfils the predictions of our critics, and 
disappears. No more Sunday rest, no more 
meeting for common prayer and praise, and for 
listening to the words of Jesus. Sunchiy soon 
grows to be like any other day, — and one mo- 
notonous, unbroken flood of work, care, study, 
amusement, sweeps through the year from January 
to December. Children are born, and no baptismal 
water consecrates them to God ; our loved ones 



THE CHURCH AND WORSHIP. 89 

die, and no words full of immortal hope are spoken 
over them. The Bible, no longer read in public, 
is forgotten. It no longer stands as a Divine Law, 
commanding man to love his neighbor as himself; 
to overcome evil with good ; to do justly, and love 
mercy, and w^alk humbly with God. Instead, we 
have the daily newspaper and the monthly mag- 
azine ; instead of apostles, political editors ; in- 
stead of prophets, lyceum orators. We shall 
have science, indeed, and art, and civilization ; 
but will these supply the place of religion ? Will 
chemistry and biology take the place of the love of 
God? Civilization is knowledge, wealth, luxury, 
art : but heap them up ever so high around jon ; 
abolish poverty, give comforts and luxuries to all, 
— have you abolished in the soul the need of God ? 
The church alone, of all human institutions, 
speaks to us of immortality, of heaven, of an 
Infinite Father and Friend. It alone supplies the 
deepest need of the human heart, and is there- 
fore built on a rock ; and, no matter what storms 
of revolution or floods of change may come, it will 
not fall. The rock on which the church stands is 
not a creed nor a miracle ; not a pope or a priest ; 
not superstition, nor ceremony, nor habit : but the 
everlasting need felt by the earthly child for his 
heavenly Father. 



90 THE CHURCH AND WORSHIP. 

European thinkers, alienated from the church, 
are excusable in not recognizing it as created by 
human needs ; for there it is an establishment 
supported by the power of the State. But in this 
country no one is obliged to go to church, or to 
pay for public worship. Yet consider its progress 
here during twenty years. In 1850, there were 
38,000 churches in the United States ; in 1860, 
there were 54,000; and in 1870, 63,000. In 
1850, the church property in the land was valued 
at 87,000,000 of dollars ; in 1860, at 171,000,000 ; 
in 1870, at 354,000,000. During those ten years, 
which included the ravage and desolation of the 
civil war, the church property was doubled. This 
does not look as if the people of the United 
States think that the church is not needed, or as 
if it were soon to come to an end. 

So much for the answer to the sceptic : now for 
the answer of the sectarian. The sectarian is a 
man who is persuaded that his own particular 
denomination is to swallow up all the rest. If he 
is a Roman Catholic, then that is to be the only 
church in the future. If he is a Presbyterian or 
a Methodist, then he believes all Christians are to 
become believers in the Assembly's Catechism 
or followers of John Wesley. If he is an Epis- 



THE CHURCH AND WORSHIP. 91 

copalian, he calls that sect " the church," and 
somehow thinks that by calling it so he will make 
it so. If he is a Baptist, he cannot recognize 
any body of Christians as a church of Christ, 
wherein men are not baptized by immersion, and 
confession ; and I ought to say — for we have 
sectarians among the Unitarians — that, if he is a 
Unitarian, he is likely to believe that the world 
are to be followers of Dr. Channing. Thus, while 
the census, which is truly catholic, tells us that 
there are 63,000 churches in the country, the sec- 
tarian Roman Catholic sees only his own 4,000 ; 
the sectarian Episcopalian, his own 3,000 ; the 
sectarian Presbyterian, his own 6,000 ; the sec- 
tarian Baptist, his own 13,000 ; the sectarian 
Methodist, his own 21,000. 

These conceits are childish, and would be inno- 
cent, did the} 7 not weaken that union, co-operation, 
and brotherly love which are essential elements of 
Christianity. Sectarianism fosters spiritual pride ; 
it lays stress on forms ; it encourages making 
proselytes to a party instead of making converts 
to God. Instead of contending against evil, the 
churches light with each other. Each tries to 
exalt itself at the expense of its neighbor, for- 
getting that those who exalt themselves shall be 



92 THE CHURCH AND WORSHIP. 

abased ; forgetting, also, that if one member 
suffer, all must suffer with it. How foolish it is to 
suppose that any one denomination is to swallow 
up all the rest ! If any one were likely to do so, 
it would be the Roman Catholic, — the largest, the 
oldest, the best organized of all. There is some- 
thing imposing in its vast assumptions, in its un- 
changeable polic} r , its uniform aspect, in Europe or 
America, Asia or Australia. Many look with alarm 
on its rapid growth in this country, in numbers, 
in wealth and influence. Its organs speak with 
proud confidence of its coming power, when it is 
to conquer all the Protestant denominations and 
reign alone. An idle hope ! If, in the sixteenth 
century, when it possessed all Europe, it was not 
able to resist the Reformation or to put it down, 
how can it succeed in regaining its power, when 
it is opposed not only by the Greek Church and 
the Protestant Church, but by the progress of 
civilization and the spirit of the age? As one 
church among many, it has done great services, 
and can do more. But, by claiming too much, it 
is in danger of losing all. The nations which 
rejected it — Germany, England, Scandinavia, 
Russia, and the United States — have advanced 
from weakness to power, and have become the 



THE CHURCH AND WORSHIP. 93 

leading States of the world. The countries 
which clung to it — Spain, Italy, and Austria — 
have gone down from power to weakness ; and 
these nations are now throwing off its authoritj^, 
and are likel} T to become its most radical oppo- 
nents. 

Regarding the Catholic Church as a church, I 
respect its influence and wish it all success. Look- 
ing at it as a sect, seeking to conquer all the 
others, I regard it as pursuing an unattainable 
chimera. The success of every church, sect, 
part}', is limited by its power of meeting certain 
human needs. There are men and women who 
are made to be Catholics ; others made to be 
Methodists ; others to be Presbyterians, Sweden- 
borgians, Quakers, Episcopalians, Unitarians. 
Each man is benefited and made happy by being 
in the place which suits him, — where his mind 
and heart are most at home, where his soul is fed 
with meat convenient for it. Some men can be 
made better by one form of faith and worship, 
some by another. Therefore, we need all churches 
and all denominations, in order to meet all wants. 
There is the same essential truth and the same 
essential love in all. All teach the same piety 
and the same morality. They teach from the same 



94 THE CnURCH AND WORSHIP. 

Bible, they sing the same hymns, they offer the 
same prayers. There is not one sort of honesty 
for Baptists and another for Methodists. Epis- 
copalians and Quakers have the same kind of 
charity for the poor and sympathy with the suf- 
fering. There may be diversities of gifts, but 
there is the same spirit ; and there may be differ- 
ences of administration, but the same Lord ; and 
diversities of operations, but the same God. 
Among all these varieties, there is one Lord, one 
faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, 
who is above all, and through all, and in them all. 
No one church will swallow up the rest, so long 
as the Lord makes men different from each other 
in tastes and qualities of mind. A Methodist, 
happy when he can be moved emotionally, and 
have a good warm time, is chilled by the atmos- 
phere of a Unitarian or even an Episcopal church. 
One man finds his joy in reading Sweclenborg, 
while another would starve on that diet. Many 
members, but one body. We ought to rejoice that 
ours is not the only church, since we cannot feed 
all. We ought to thank God that, since we can- 
not become all things to all men, other things be- 
sides ours are provided, that all may be satisfied. 
Some denominations are the Master's eye and ear, 



THE CHURCH AND WORSHIP. 95 

with which he can see and hear ; another his feet, 
with which he can walk ; another his hand, with 
which to touch and heal. If the whole body were 
the eye, where were the hearing? If the whole 
body were hand, where the walking? Let not, 
then, the head say to the feet : "I have no need 
of you." For God hath set in the church, first, 
Roman Catholics ; next, the Greeks ; then the Lu- 
therans ; after that, Episcopalians, Baptists, or 
Presbyterians, for the perfecting of the saints, 
for the work of the minist^, for the edifying of 
the body of Christ. 

I go some Sunday into an old school Presbyte- 
rian church, and sit down. It is communion Sun- 
da}', and the minister proceeds to "fence the 
table," as it is called ; in other words, to say who 
must not partake of the Master's feast. I, being 
a Unitarian, am shut out. He can keep me from 
the bread and wine, symbols of my Master's truth 
and love ; but can he keep me from my Master 
himself ? No : if I have faith in Christ, the 
fences fall before it. I sit at my Lord's feet. I 
am blessed b}^ his love. I hear him say : " Son, 
be of good cheer ; thy sins are forgiven thee ! " 
We are all one in Christ Jesus. The barriers 
have fallen away, and I am in the midst of my 
brethren. 



96 THE CHURCH AND WORSHIP. 

Perhaps, then, I open the hymn-book, and, as 
I turn the leaves, I find in it hymns by Watts and 
Wesley, Heber and Montgomery, and the Roman 
Catholic Faber ; and here, in the midst of this 
goodly company of psalmists and saints, I find, 
"Watchman, tell ns of the night," or " In the 
Cross of Christ I glory," by the Unitarian, Bow- 
ring ; or " Sleep, sleep to-day, tormenting cares," 
by the Unitarian, Mrs. Barbauld ; and directly my 
Presb3 x terian friends begin to sing, " Nearer, my 
God, to Thee," by the Unitarian, Sarah Flower 
Adams. Then I say, the hymn-book is the type 
of the truly Catholic Church which is to be ; for 
here are collected singers of every sect and every 
name ; and, as on the day of Pentecost, they all 
speak in our own tongue, in which we were born. 
The hymn-book shows that piet} r , or love to God, 
is always essentially one and the same thing, in 
all churches, all sects, all lands, all times. 

Mrs. Barbauld, whom I just now mentioned, 
has a little apologue to show that charity also, or 
love to man, is the same thing, in all sects and 
churches. A mother is walking with her little 
boy, on Sunday, in the streets of a large city. 
The street is filled with people, who turn into the 
different churches, — some into the Established 



THE CHURCH AND WORSHIP. 97 

church, some into the different chapels. And the 
little boy wonders why, since they have the same 
Master, the}' should go in such different directions. 
But when the services are over, and the people 
are on their way home, a man falls in the street 
with a sudden attack of illness ; and then a Pres- 
byterian runs up and lifts him from the ground, 
a Methodist runs for a doctor, a Baptist gets 
water and bathes his forehead ; and the mother, 
turning to her little boy, says: " You see, my 
child, that, though their modes of worship are 
different, their charity is the same." 

The broad churchman is one who sees and 
knows that all Christian churches are essentially 
one ; that piety and charity are the same in all ; 
and while every sect and denomination is an indi- 
vidual member, doing its own work, and having 
a right to its own place and sphere, it ought not 
to be separated from the rest. It is only in the 
lower conditions of organic life that organs can" 
be separated from each other, and the animal con- 
tinue to thrive. In the higher orders and classes, 
each organ is necessary for the perfect life of the 
whole. The Christian church is in a low condi- 
tion when its different parts are disunited, — a 
foot here, a hand there, and the head apart from 

7 



98 THE CHURCH AND WORSHIP. 

both. In the future and higher church, every 
branch will be more active in its individual sphere, 
and 3 r et more vitally united with the whole. Their 
functions will remain different : their life will be 
the same. 

In order to act efficiently, the church of the fu- 
ture must be thoroughly organized. But, in order 
to meet the wants of all parts of society, it must 
include every thing valuable that is in all existing 
churches. It must take in Catholics and Protes- 
tants, and have place and work for all who love 
God and his truth sincerely. The Eoman Catho- 
lic church has union, but not freedom ; the Protes- 
tant churches have freedom, but not union ; the 
church of the future must have both. Its unities 
will be those of the early church, — " One Lord, 
one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, 
who is above all, and through all, and in you all." 
Its one Lord will be Christ himself; its one faith, 
trust in him ; its one baptism, the answer of a 
good conscience towards God ; its God will be the 
God and Father of Christ, who is the universal 
friend. All who so believe in Jesus as to co- 
operate in doing good and getting good will be 
received as his disciples. 

The church of the future will contain differ- 



THE CHURCH AND WORSHIP. 99 

ences of ceremony and ritual, and will allow per- 
fect liberty of opinion. It may include the solemn 
liturgy and the extemporaneous prayer, the ma- 
jestic anthem, and the Quaker silence. For some 
minds are most influenced by the one, and some by 
the other ; so the future church, like the Apostle 
Paul, will become all things to all men, that it may 
save all. If there are those to whom the light 
seems more religious when dimmed by passing 
through richly colored and storied windows, it will 
provide for them the vast cathedral with nave and 
choir and transepts and lofty spire. If any are 
benefited by having their clergy dressed in surplice 
and stole, in having holy water and incense, the 
benign church will furnish all this, but not make 
any of it essential. But, meantime, it will be a 
teaching church, a working church, a missionary 
church ; giving its strength to save mankind here 
as well as hereafter. Eve^where it will over- 
come evil by good, war by peace, hatred by love, 
error by truth, ignorance by light, vice by purity, 
unbelief by faith. 

The church of the future will convert the 
heathen to Christ, not by threats and terror, not 
by denunciation or pictures of Divine wrath ; but 
by making actual Christianity like that of Christ 



100 THE CHURCH AND WORSHIP. 

himself. When Christendom is lifted up to a 
higher Christ! anity, it will draw all men unto it. 
When the Christian world grows more pure, 
upright, noble, generous, then the fulness of the 
Gentiles will come in. The great evils and wrongs 
which now oppress humanity will melt under the 
influence of this Christian love, as the icebergs 
from the pole dissolve in the warm currents from 
tropic seas. 

The time will come at last — long foretold by 
prophet and sibyl, long retarded by unbelief and 
formalism — when wars shall cease, and the reign 
of just laws take the place of force in the great 
federation of mankind. As soon as the church 
is at peace with itself and becomes one, it will 
be able to make the world also one. Christ will 
at last become in reality the Prince of Peace, put- 
ting an end to war between nations, war between 
classes in societ}^ war between criminals and the 
State. In trade, instead of competition we shall 
have co-operation, and all industry will receive its 
just recompense. Capital will be reconciled to 
labor ; science to religion ; reason to faith ; lib- 
erty to order ; the conservatism which loves the 
stable past to the spirit of progress which forgets 
what is behind and reaches out to that which is 



THE CHURCH AND WORSHIP. 101 

before. This will be the coming of Jesus in the 
clouds of heaven with the angels of God, and the 
spirits of the just made perfect. This will be the 
new Jerusalem, coming down from heaven. This 
will be the tabernacle of God with men, w.'ien he 
will dwell with them and be their God. Then 
shall the Lamb of God be the light of the world, 
and the nations shall walk in the light of it ; and 
there shall be no more curse, and no more night, 
and no more tears, but all shall chink of the water 
of life freely. 

This great hope, so often disappointed, but for 
ever renew r ed, must at last be realized. It was 
dimly seen b}' the ancient patriarch herdsman, 
the founder of faith in one Supreme Being who 
might be the friend of man, to whom it was 
revealed, under the lonely stars wmich hung over 
Ararat, that in his seed all the families of the 
earth should be blessed. Further on, David and 
the prophets caught a clearer sight of the heavenly 
vision, and amid the rudeness of that primeval 
age declared that the time should come when the 
sword should be beaten into a ploughshare, and 
the heavens rain down righteousness upon the 
earth. Other races and nations had a like vision 
of a kingdom of heaven to come upon the earth. 



102 THE CHURCH AND WORSHIP. 

Virgil caught it from the mysterious Sibyl, and 
declared that a new order of ages was to begin, 
when all crime should end, and peace return to 
the world. The Christian church has, from age 
to age, prolonged the song of the angels, of a 
coming glory to God and good will to men. It 
has declared that Christ is to return and reign 
upon the earth in love and truth. Philosophies 
of a more material type have also chanted this 
same hymn of hope for humanity, and prophesied 
an earthly paradise to come from communism or 
the survival of the fittest. Such a hope, for ever 
renewed, in spite of perpetual disappointments, 
must indicate some conviction in the soul, so 
deep as to assure its own fulfilment. Modern 
poets look to America, and declare that the star 
of empire takes its way westward, and that 
Time's noblest drama is to find here its stage 
and its triumph. 

" The seas shall waste, the skies in smoke decay, 
Rocks fall to dust, and mountains melt away ; 
But fixed his word, his saving power remains ; 
Thy realm for ever lasts, thine own Messiah reigns ! M 



HOW DOES A MAN BECOME AT ONE WITH 
GOD? — CATASTROPHE AND EVOLUTION 
IN RELIGION. 

THE subject of this chapter is " The Essential 
and Non-Essential Elements in Christian 
Experience ; or, How does a man become at one 
with God?" I have also added the title of 
"Catastrophe and Evolution in Religion," as 
indicating the two most common views as to the 
way in which every man in Christ becomes a new 
creature. This latter phrase is borrowed from 
geology, in which the two prominent theories of 
the formation of the earth are that of gradual and 
continuous development, of which Lyell was the 
chief supporter, and that which declares that 
the earth came to its present shape after nu- 
merous catastrophes, of which, among others, 
Clarence King has recently pronounced himself 
an advocate. As there are these two Jrvpothe- 
ses as to the method by which the primitive, 



104 HOW DOES A MAN BECOME 

chaotic world became a new creation, so there 
are two similar theories concerning the process 
by which the chaos in the human soul is trans- 
formed into a cosmos of order, and man is changed 
into a new creature. The church usually teaches 
that man has fallen into sin, and that his nature 
has become so depraved that every human being 
begins his moral career with an inevitable bias 
to evil rather than to good. However much 
the old doctrine of natural and total depravity 
may have been softened, every denomination 
claiming to be orthodox declares that every child 
is fatally inclined toward evil rather than good. 
Therefore, in order to become a child of God, 
he must be radically changed. He must become 
convinced of sin, sensible of guilt, filled with 
penitence ; and then, inspired by faith in the 
promises of the gospel, he must become con- 
verted," and so be made a new creature. Such 
an entire and radical change is usually violent, 
sudden, accompanied with deep convictions. 
When completed, the whole heart is changed, 
— the man now loves what he hated, and hates 
what he before loved. After this, his life is 
wholly altered ; having done wrong and gone 
wrong before, he now begins to do right and to 



AT ONE WITH GOD? 105 

go right, and is in truth and reality a renewed 
and transformed person. It will be seen that the 
logic of such a radical change is derived from the 
assumption of a universal primitive tendency to 
evil rather than to good. Grant this, and it fol- 
lows that a catastrophe must take place when man 
is converted, — a beneficial and blessed catastro- 
phe indeed ; like those which changed the raging 
fires, boiling oceans, and bare strata of the an- 
cient world of death, into these fertile plains, for- 
ests and seas, full of life and joy. 

Every deep and long-held belief at last passes 
into language. Thus in the popular churches it 
is assumed, in the language of the pulpit, that all 
mankind are divided into two classes, the pen- 
itent and impenitent, the saints and sinners, the 
converted and unconverted, the Christians and the 
unchristians. As the people come out of the 
world and approach the gates of the sanctuary 
on the Lord's day, they seem very much alike : 
with no great difference among them. There are 
good people, and people perhaps not quite so 
good as they ; but it is impossible for an}- man 
outside the church to draw a line which shall 
divide them all into two classes. But the mo- 
ment they enter the building, and the clergyman 



106 HOW DOES A MAN BECOME 

looks down upon them, at once they are divided 
into " my penitent hearers " and my " impenitent 
hearers ; " and are spoken of as converted or 
unconverted, just as they would be spoken of as 
Germans or Irishmen or Americans. The chief 
object of the church in all its work is to change 
the second class into the first, to convert sinners, 
and to bring them to repentance. It is assumed 
not only that this vital and radical change is to 
take place in all persons before they can be re- 
garded as God's children, but also that it is an 
evident and apparent one, that you can tell a con- 
verted man from an unconverted one, just as you 
can tell a Frenchman from an American. More- 
over, this belief when established works its own 
fulfilment. If children are taught from the first 
in their Sunday schools and churches that they 
are children of wrath, that they are radically sin- 
ful by their very nature, that the} r do not love 
God and cannot, until they are essentially changed, 
— what is the natural result ? That they do not 
try to do what is impossible, — the}' consider them- 
selves outside of the kingdom of heaven. God is 
not yet their friend, nor Christ their Saviour, — 
not till they are converted. If they die uncon- 
verted, they die without hope. One of two things, 



AT ONE WITH GOD? 107 

then. They become careless and indifferent, hop- 
ing to be converted at some future time, but 
meantime meaning to enjoy this world as much as 
possible. Or else they try to be converted, and 
pray and agonize to pass through this mystical 
experience, till at last a reaction takes place, some 
rest comes to their mind, some comfort to their 
heart, and they joj^fullv take this as a proof that 
God loves them, and that they are converted to 
him. Then the3 r , too, will always think that con- 
version is something sudden and painful, and will 
hold to the theory of catastrophe in religion. 
Generalizing their own history, they will assume 
that no religious experience is genuine w T hich is 
not stamped with such marks as these. 

And now we ask, What truth is there in this 
doctrine ? It is certainty true that no man can 
serve two masters. Every one must be going in 
the right way or the wrong, aiming at truth and 
good, or not aiming at it. There is always some 
ruling motive in the soul, some chief purpose, 
eminent desire, overruling wish, to which, in case 
of conflict, all others must give way. Airv ps}'- 
chology which ignores this fact is fatally deficient. 
Man was made, not to drift, but to steer. He must 
choose the good, and refuse the evil. If he does 



108 HOW DOES A MAN BECOME 

not do so, he virtually chooses the evil ; just as a 
citizen who does not mean to obey the laws is at 
heart a criminal, ready to disobey them when any 
occasion comes. In an army, a soldier wiio does 
not mean to obe}^, means to disobey ; and is at 
heart already mutinous. In a nation, a citizen 
who does not mean to obey the government is at 
heart a rebel. So a human being, in whom God 
has placed a conscience, making distinction be- 
tween right and wrong, if he does not mean to 
obe} r his conscience, disobeys it. In this sense, 
it is certainly true that he who is not with God is 
against him. And in all such cases a change, to 
be thorough, must be a deliberate, conscious de- 
cision to do right and not wrong henceforth and 
alwa}^. 

Again, it is very certain that a large number 
of people, even in Christian communities, have no 
determined purpose of right-doing. Their highest 
rule is not the law of God in their conscience, 
but some human law, public opinion, or personal 
convenience. They are not steering, but reall}- 
drifting. They have no infinite Master whom 
they obey, no infinite Father whom they love, and 
therefore cannot be considered as having any 
Christian aim. They are children of the world, 



AT OXE WITH GOD? 109 

not children of God. As long as it is easy to do 
right, they will do it ; as long as it is prosperous 
to be just, they will be honest. But when the rains 
of adversity descend, and the floods of temptation 
arise, and the winds of trial blow, they will be 
likely to fall, for they have no rock of a divine con- 
viction and faith under their feet. Now, these 
people, though they may be very pleasant and 
agreeable persons, really need to be converted, 
just as much as any convict in the State prison, 
for they are no more serving God than he is. It 
will not do to assume that all respectable, decent, 
and well-behaved people are necessarily going the 
right way. The} T may be realty going down, not 
up, — slowly, insensibly perhaps, but steadily. 
And, if so, then they must be called upon to re- 
pent, and to make themselves a new heart and a 
new spirit. And that will probably be a sudden 
change^ even though it may not be a public or 
open one. It is, therefore, no wonder that there 
should still be so much of what I have called 
catastrophe in religious experience. To one 
whose mind has not been imbued with the sight 
of eternal realities from childhood, their coming 
must be often like that of the earthquake, the fire, 
the hurricane, and the volcano, rather than that 
of the still, small voice. 



110 HOW DOES A MAN BECOME 

What are the essential facts in this Christian 
experience ? They are two, — the two which Paul 
declared to be the sum and substance of his 
preaching both to Jews and Greeks ; that is, 
the essence of Christianity, when disembarrassed 
of any thing merely Jewish or merely Pagan. 
He tells the elders of the church of Ephesus that 
he had kept back nothing profitable, but had 
taught them in public and private, repentance 
toward God and faith toward our Lord Jesus 
Christ. 

Repentance and faith, — these are the two poles 
of Christian experience, around which it must 
ever revolve. Call them by other names, if you 
will, — ' t sin and pardon ; " " determination to 
obey God, and trust in his love;" "doing our 
duty, and pra}ing for help to do it right ; " " law 
and grace ; " c c works and faith ; " or, more largely 
generalized, " the sense of responsibility and the 
sense of dependence," — these are the two essen- 
tial elements of all vital religion. Man, born 
with a conscience which gives him the idea of an 
eternal law of duty, of an everlasting distinction 
between good and evil, light and darkness, right 
and wrong, knows well that he ought always to 
choose the good and refuse the evil. This is the 



AT ONE WITH GOD? Ill 

doctrine, not of Christianity or Judaism only, but 
of natural religion everywhere ; and this law of ob- 
ligation is unchanging and everlasting. This law 
of duty, which is above man, is also in man, rooted 
and fixed in the very texture of his soul, and 
we never can escape from it but by fulfilling it. 
Conscience sits supreme in every soul, an absolute 
autocrat, claiming our entire allegiance. We can 
turn from it, stultify it with sophistry, sear it with 
sin ; but it is there always, ready to reawaken, — 
and its awakening is terrible. Then there may 
be a shock like an earthquake, and the whole soul 
may tremble to its centre, listening to that awful 
voice as to the trumpet of the archangel. If the 
man hearkens to it and determines to obey it, and 
to live for what is right at all hazards, that is 
the first step of Christian experience. This is re- 
pentance or conversion. It is turning and begin- 
ning to go the right way. 

But that is not enough : that is only half of 
what all men need for spiritual life and progress. 
To determine to do one's duty, no matter how 
hard, in spite of all temptation, — that is the 
beginning, the Alpha of all religion. But what 
shall help us to fulfil this purpose ? We are weak ; 
evil habit is strong ; we are beset by temptation 



112 HOW DOES A M AN BECOME 

without and within, and we cry with Paul, " To 
will is present with me, but how to perform that 
which I will I find not." We resolve to do right, 
and presently we do wrong. We find a law in 
the flesh warring against the law of the mind. 
We need help of some sort, strength to do what 
we resolve to do, for a resolution alone is not 
enough. Then comes the second great fact of 
Christian experience, "Faith toward our Lord 
Jesus Christ." And what is the essential thing 
in this faith ? Is it any belief about his rank and 
power in the universe, such as the Greek theolo- 
gians quarrelled about for three centuries ? Is it 
any metaphysical speculation as to the precise 
way in which the death of Jesus made it possible 
for God to forgive sin ? Is it any profession of 
faith, or verbal declaration, — as though merely 
saying something about Jesus was to save the 
soul? No. The saving faith in Jesus Christ is 
to believe as he believed, trust in God as he 
trusted, hope as he hoped, and love as he loved. 
Just as we eat and drink food, and it becomes a 
part of our body, — it is to eat and drink Christ, 
so that his spirit shall enter into ours, and be the 
life of our soul. It is to trust in that infinite 
tenderness in which he trusted ; to receive that 



AT ONE WITH GOD? 113 

boundless compassion which Jesus made known ; 
to be pardoned, comforted, and made at peace 
with God by the truth and the love of which 
Jesus was the manifestation. If I were to say 
that " God was in Christ, reconciling the world 
unto himself," I should say exactly what I myself 
believe. But I use the words in no dogmatic and 
doctrinal sense, but as expressing the fact that 
what we see of Gocl, as shown by Jesus, is that 
which brings the soul to him, and fills it with his 
peace. When we see Christ as he was and is, 
we look through the character of Christ and see 
that of God ; see, reflected in this human child, 
something of the love of the Infinite Father. 
This sense of God's pardoning and saving love is 
the Omega, as the sense of duty is the Alpha, of 
all Christian experience. 

But now we must ask again, Is it necessary 
that this experience should come in a moment, 
suddenly, and with a great commotion of the 
soul ? May it not begin in the earliest childhood, 
be increased gradually by Christian education, 
and thus grow by a slow but continuous process 
of evolution and development into its full power 
and efficacy ? A large part of the church declares 
that it may. In the first place, this is taught by 

8 



114 HOW DOES A MAN BECOME 

all the sacramental churches, — who believe that 
the unconscious infant begins its spiritual life 
when the baptismal water touches its brow and 
the benediction is pronounced over it. Admit- 
ting the doctrine of hereditary depravity, they 
escape its consequences by the ordinance of infant 
baptism. The baptized child has become a child 
of God, just as if it had never inherited the curse 
of Adam. Now, all that it needs is Christian 
education and Christian sacraments, to keep it 
from going astray. And if the only way of 
escape from the cruel theology which declares 
every human being to be born in sin, if the only 
escape from this were to believe that this taint is 
wiped away at once by the rite of baptism, then I 
should pray God to enable me to believe it, and I 
should be glad to join the Roman Catholic and the 
high churchman in this sacramental rescue of the 
innocents. Let the evil introduced by one false 
theology be cured, if possible, by another. Two 
theological negatives might thus destroy the ne- 
gation. 

The rational Christian, however, takes another 
and a better way. He admits the fact, apparent 
to all, that we do inherit bodily tendencies which 
may be temptations to evil. Both right-doing 



AT ONE WITH GOD? 115 



and wrong-doing become at last habits, and these 
habits become instincts, and are transmitted 
from generation to generation. But it does not 
follow that there is any irresistible bias to evil, 
or any tendency which may not be overcome by 
education and example. Faith in Christ requires 
us to believe that good is stronger than evil, and 
can overcome it. Instead of taking for granted that 
children must go wrong, let us rather show them 
that we expect them to go right. Let us believe 
that God has planted in every soul aspirations 
for goodness, capacities for generosity, the love 
of truth, the sense of justice, — and let it be the 
business of the church to develop these germs of 
a true life, — so that no painful conversion shall 
ever be necessary. 

I suppose it is a matter of fact that the ma- 
jority of all church-members, even in those de- 
nominations which la}' the most stress on sudden 
conversions, have become Christians by education 
and slow development. It has been repeatedly 
declared, in Sunday-school conventions, that sta- 
tistics show the majority of church-members to be 
the children of Christian parents, brought up from 
childhood in the faith and practice of the gospel. 
The theory may require them to be suddenly con- 



116 HOW DOES A MAN BECOME 

verted to religion : the fact shows that they were 
gradually educated to religion. The proportion 
of church-members suddenly converted to those 
who were educated is much as it was at first in 
the company of the Apostles. Paul was con- 
verted in a moment ; but the rest of the Apostles 
were educated gradually by the influence and 
teaching of Jesus, by keeping company with him, 
hearing his words, and seeing his works. At the 
last, there came to them on the day of Pentecost 
the tongues of fire, enabling them to preach the 
word with efficacy. But that could hardly be 
called their Christian conversion. It was the 
promised power from on high, given them for 
the preaching of the Word. This history of the 
Apostles therefore shows that the chief method 
of the church in bringing souls to God should not 
be by catastrophe so much as by evolution. We 
should grow up in all things into Him who is our 
Head. 

Other arguments of the evolutionists, as we 
shall call them, who are in favor of bringing men 
to God by a gradual education rather than by a 
sudden conversion, are these: "Is there not," 
they say, u something unnatural in the very notion 
of these violent conversions ? We admit that, if 



AT ONE WITH GOD? 117 

men have been estranged from God and Christ, 
living worldly, selfish, and sensual lives, they may 
find their return to the right way accompanied 
with a shock. If people have become lost in a 
forest, they may have difficulty in getting back to 
the road. But cannot Christians walk directly 
forward on the highway to heaven, from child- 
hood? Is there not such a wry? Did not Christ 
declare himself to be the way ? According to the 
theory of catastrophes, there is no way, no reg- 
ular method. The Apostles were called the serv- 
ants of the most high God, who show^ the way of 
salvation. Modern Protestant Orthodoxy is in a 
most unsatisfactory attitude. The business of the 
church is to bring the world to God. Then it 
ought to know exactly how to do it, — how to begin, 
how to go on, how to finish. Such is the case 
with all other work. If a man is to build a house, 
he does not bring together his materials, hire his 
masons and carpenters, and, when all are ready, 
sit down and wait for some sudden shock or emo- 
tion hy which they shall be enabled to go on with 
their work. If we are merchants, lawyers, teach- 
ers, blacksmiths, we do not wait for a revival 
before we can fulfil our engagements. It is only 
in converting the world to God, — the most im- 



118 HOW DOES A MAN BECOME 

portant work of all, — that this strange S3 r stem is 
adopted. Here, there seems to be no regular 
method of growth in goodness ; but we must use 
the means of grace, and then wait for the result. 
Religion is to be obtained by some supernatural 
method, — by a spasm, an agony, a struggle, — 
not by any regular, practical work. If a man 
wished to become a Christian in the da}^s of the 
Apostles, he went to them and said, ' What shall 
1 do to be saved?' and they answered at once, 
according to his case, either, 4 Repent and be con- 
verted,' — if he was committing some sin, — or, 
'Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ,' — if what he 
needed was faith, — or, 'Be baptized,' — if what 
was wanted was an open avowal. But now, if one 
asks, ' What shall I do to be saved?' no one can 
exactly say what is to be done. There is a 
prolonged struggle, an agony, prayers, tears, — 
finally there may or there may not come relief and 
comfort. If these come, it is assumed that the 
man is converted ; otherwise, he must wait and 
try again. All this confusion," say the evolution- 
ists, " is the result of this false method of reliance 
on catastrophes. The Roman Catholic Church 
does better, for that commits no such blunder. 
No doubt, it admits revivals into its system, and 



AT ONE WITH GOD? 119 

has its seasons of extraordinary attention to reli- 
gion. But it does not depend on them to create 
religion in the soul, but only to increase its glow 
and power. In the Roman Catholic Church, every 
baptized person is taught to believe himself a 
Christian, so long as he does not continue in 
mortal sin, but preserves his Christian life by a 
regular use of the sacraments. Every Eoman 
Catholic who obeys the rules of his church is 
taught that he is safe and in the right way. In 
most Protestant churches, if its children born and 
brought up in it are Christians, it is, so far as 
theology is concerned, only a fortunate accident-" 
Another bad result of this method, say the 
evolutionists, is that it discourages some and in- 
flates others. He who has not been able, for 
some reason, to obtain these inward experiences, 
considers himself as no Christian, having no part 
in the hopes of the gospel. He who has been 
through such an experience, and has attained a 
hope, thinks himself safe. He is safe, he believes, 
because of his past experience, not because of his 
present fidelity. He was converted at such a time, 
so he trusts that he is right. To work out his 
salvation b} r deeds of charity and by growth in 
goodness would, he thinks, be to rely on mere 



120 HOW DOES A MAN BECOME 

morality. Therefore, the members do not grow in 
knowledge or in grace, as they otherwise would. 
Hence, the reproach often made, sometimes un- 
justly indeed but sometimes justly, that church- 
members are no better than others. They are 
not taught that airy thing depends on being 
better. Most stress is laid on conversion, 
little on progress. Thus, they are exposed to 
great temptation, and may be led into spiritual 
pride, which so often goes before destruction. Is 
it not possible, it is asked, that some of the moral 
disasters which have befallen leading men in the 
church are owing to the false security which such 
men have felt in consequence of this theory that 
Christianity consists essentially in being converted, 
not in leading an upright life? Therefore, say the 
evolutionists, a wholly different method is neces- 
sary. We ought to take our little children at 
the beginning, and, instead of trying to torture 
them by an effort to obtain a change of heart, 
teach them that they already belong to God and 
Christ, and that they are in the kingdom of 
Heaven now. Teach them that so long as they 
try to correct their faults, obey their parents, and 
fulfil their duties, they are in the right way. Teach 
them to pray to God, not as aliens or outcasts, 



AT ONE WITH GOBI 121 

but as his children, and to grow up from faith to 
greater faith. Make them understand that, while 
the}' are thus living in obedience and faith, they 
are in the peace of God, and have a right to all 
the promises and hopes of the gospel. Teach 
them that the work of life is to get good and to 
do good. Convert sinners by the same doctrine : 
make them understand that God is not hidden nor 
afar off; that he is not in some distant heaven, 
nor beyond some far-off gulf of space, but very 
nigh to us all, in our conscience and our heart, 
ready to help, to bless, and to save at every hour. 
These are the two theories in regard to the way 
of salvation, — which is the true one ? One of 
these theories, it will be seen, lays the principal 
stress on the beginning of the Christian life, — that 
is, on conversion ; the other, on the development of 
the Christian life, — that is, growth in goodness. 
Now, according to any theory of Christianity, both 
are necessaiy. Is Christianity a journey, a " Pil- 
grim's Progress " to heaven ? Then it is necessary 
to begin the journey, to be sure that we realty are 
intending to go, and that we have begun to go. 
It will not do not to assume that all men are on 
their way to heaven. The}' must adopt a purpose, 
commence a work, begin to go, put themselves in 



122 HOW DOES A MAN BECOME 

the right way ; and, until this is done, nothing is 
done. So far, the believers in catastrophes are 
right. But, on the other hand, what is the use 
of beginning the journey, unless we go forward? 
What good in being converted to God, unless we 
learn to obey God ? The object of Christianity is 
to change this world into the kingdom of heaven ; 
but the kingdom of heaven is not meat nor drink, 
but righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy 
Ghost. It is to do justly and love mercy and 
walk humbly with God. Unless we enter this 
kingdom of truth and love, what good in passing 
the portal ? The only advantage in beginning to 
go on this journey is that we should keep on and 
arrive at the end. 

Is Christianity a life ? Then, in order to live, we 
must be born ; but, unless we grow up, what good 
in being born? The Christian life is one of faith, 
hope, love, obedience, — the life of God in the soul 
of man. We are born into that life by a deter- 
mination to obey God and do his will. We grow 
up by daily obedience, daily trust, daily praj^er. 

This life, as we have seen, consists of two parts : 
one, which depends on ourselves ; the other, 
which comes from God. The part which depends 
on ourselves begins with repentance and conver- 



AT ONE WITH GOD? 123 

sion, and goes on by continued well-doing. It is 
work, all through. The part which depends on 
God is all of grace, — it is from grace to grace, 
— grace ail through. It was by the grace of God 
that Christ carne. God so loved the world that 
he sent his Son, our brother, to show the way of 
salvation. It is by grace that he comes to us, 
and that we are born amid the promises and hopes 
of the gospel. It is God's grace which forgives 
our sin when we repent. It is God's grace which 
leads us to repentance by inspiring faith in his 
love. It is the grace of God which invites us 
to pray, and it is his grace which answers our 
prayers, takes the burden from the heart, and 
fills it with his peace. All we have to do in order 
to be saved is to work and to trust. There are 
no obscure nrysteries to be believed, no awful bur- 
dens to be borne, no sin which cannot be pardoned 
if we repent, nothing to do but what Gocl will give 
us strength to accomplish. We are saved by faith, 
and also by works. If we had not faith, we should 
not have the courage to work ; if we did not work, 
our faith would soon die, — for faith without work 
is dead. 

Genuine Christian experience, therefore, may 
be sudden or gradual, or both. Conversion, or 



124 HOW DOES A MAN BECOME 

turning round, is alwaj^s sudden. If one is doing 
wrong or going wrong, he cannot too suddenly 
begin to go right. But going forward is gradual, 
growth is gradual, progress is gradual. The com- 
ing of God's life in the soul is like the coming of 
spring. A little while ago, all was cold and hard 
and dead. Now, a soft breath of warm odor fills 
the air, the life stirs in a million buds, the grass 
begins to grow green over a thousand miles of mea- 
dow and prairie, a wave of verdure rolls slowly 
up from the south over the northern forests. 
Every majestic oak, every little bush, shakes out 
its tender leaves to welcome the coming sun ; in- 
sects hum, birds carol, the fish flashes through the 
stream. So is the coming of God's love and truth 
in the human soul. As the earth, in spring, turns 
itself upward toward the sun, so we turn our 
hearts upward to God in submission and trust. 
As the sun pours down his answering radiance, 
magnetizing every germ into advancing life, so 
the spirit of God descends softly into all willing 
hearts, creating a new vitality within. There en- 
ters the soul a sense of pardon, comfort, and peace ; 
and out of this there come the flowers of beauty 
and the fruits of goodness. " The wilderness and 
solitary place shall be glad for them ; the desert 



AT ONE WITH GOD? 125 

shall rejoice and blossom as the rose." " The 
parched ground shall become a pool, and the thirsty 
land springs of water." "And a highway shall 
be there, and a way, and it shall be called the way 
of holiness : the wayfaring men, though fools, 
shall not err therein." 

On this deep foundation of Christian experience 
all Christianity rests. It is the solid rock beneath 
the church, — like Peter's faith, which flesh and 
blood had not revealed to him, but the Father which 
is in heaven. All belief in Christ and Christi- 
anity, founded on hearsay, which flesh and blood 
have revealed, is unstable. Human teaching ; the 
authority of others ; the belief of parents and 
friends ; the outward blessings and advantages of 
religion, — these are only like John the Baptist, 
sent to prepare the way of the Lord. Not till we 
come to God ourselves, by personal submission 
to the law of right, personal trust in his all-suffi- 
cient love, do we have any solid Christianity. 
After that, if we speak, we speak what we know 
and testify what we have seen. If men fall away 
from religion and become unbelievers, it is be- 
cause they have never really had any true reli- 
gious experience. For what we have once seen, 
once known, of God, Christ, duty, love, immor- 



126 HOW DO WE BECOME AT ONE WITH GODt 

tal hope, is a possession for ever. Heaven and 
earth may pass away ; but this Divine word, once 
seen and known, shall never pass away. 

On this solid personal experience, the whole 
future of Christianity must rest. This is still the 
rock on which Christ builds his church, and which 
will for ever resist all that can injure or destroy. 
Out of this deep, broad, living Christian experi- 
ence, shall come that future church of Christ which 
shall combine variety with unity, works with faith ; 
which shall be broad enough to adapt itself to 
all human diversity, deep enough to satisfy all 
human needs ; so progressive as to walk abreast 
with all human development ; so aspiring as to 
bring down God's kingdom to this world and 
make heaven upon earth. But the Christian ex- 
perience, out of which all this grand future shall 
grow, will be nothing narrow, nothing formal, and 
not a mere confused emotion. It will be the vis- 
ion of God's truth and God's love, — the light of 
things eternal. It may come suddenly or gradu- 
ally, but it will be always essentially the same. 
It will always consist in the sight of the Divine 
holiness, justice, truth, order, and law, — producing 
obedience, — and the sight of God's pardoning 
love, saving grace, spiritual influence to redeem 
and bless, — producing faith, hope, love. 



VI. 



WHAT ARE THE ESSENTIAL REASONS FOR 
BELIEVING IN A FUTURE EXISTENCE, AND 
WHAT WILL THAT EXISTENCE BE? 

I HA YE to speak, in this closing chapter, of the 
essentials and non-essentials in regard to a 
future life. What are the essential reasons for 
believing in a future existence? First comes 
the remarkable fact that it has been the faith of 
the human race. In all ages, lands, civiliza- 
tions, races, religions, men have believed in a 
hereafter. All the great religions have taught it, 
— Zoroaster and Buddha, from the far East, and 
from out of a gray antiquit} T ; Brahminism ; the 
religion of ancient Eg}^pt, Greece, Rome ; these 
all declare with one consent that, if a man die, 
he shall live again. Poetry, legend, romance, 
superstition, agree in looking out of time across 
that sea of one shore which we call death, and 
painting pictures of the other land which, as 
they take for granted, lies unseen beyond. The 
most savage races of Africa, or the islands of the 
Pacific, are haunted by the terrors of ghosts and 



128 BELIEF IN A FUTURE EXISTENCE. 

spectres whose existence is a part of their fixed 
belief. And, when we ascend to the other ex- 
treme of the scale of human development, and 
commune with the demi-gods of thought, — with 
men made little lower than the angels, — we find 
the childish superstitions of the ignorant lifted into 
a calm faith in immortality. Among the events of 
this earth, that which, with one exception, touches 
our hearts most deeply, is the long conversation 
held by Socrates, on the day of his execution, 
with his disciples. This great truth-seeker de- 
votes the last hours of his life to considering the 
arguments for immortality and the objections to 
it, and, having replied to all the objections, looks 
forward with confidence to another existence. 
Calm, wise, tender, without fear, he advances 
toward death, sure that death will only touch his 
bod} r , not his mind. When sunset was near, he 
said : ' 6 Let the poison be prepared, — for it is best 
not to linger." Crito asked: " How should you 
like to have us bury you?" Socrates replied, 
with a smile : " Any way you wish, — if you can 
only get hold of me. Have I not shown you, 
Crito, that I, who have been talking to } T ou, am 
not the other Socrates who will soon be a dead 
body? Do not say, then, at my funeral, ' Let us 



BELIEF IN A FUTURE EXISTENCE. 129 

bury Socrates,' — for such words are not only 
false, but they infect the soul with evil." And 
when we pass up from Socrates to one still greater 
than he, — to the highest of all human souls, — 
we find him sa}ing not only that he is immortal, 
but that he is immortality. Immortal life and the 
resurrection, or the rising up of the human being, 
these he declares to be the very essence and cen- 
tre of the true man himself. u I am the resur- 
rection and the life ; he that believeth in me " — 
that is, he who believes in that truth which is the 
essence of my being — " he shall never die." In 
other words, the soul itself is essential life, and 
death cannot touch it. 

I do not mean to say that this universal belief 
in a hereafter has no exceptions. There have 
always been a small number of doubters who have 
not been able to accept this doctrine. There 
have been two difficulties, and very important 
ones, which have staggered them. First, there is 
the impenetrable veil which hangs between us and 
the other world. It is so strange that those noble 
souls, so full of interest in this life and in human 
affairs, should pass away and never be heard of 
again ; that those hearts, bound to us by an affec- 
tion stronger than adamant, should leave us and 

9 



130 BELIEF IN A FUTURE EXISTENCE. 

never come to us any more ! If they were alive, 
if the} r were anywhere, should we not somehow 
know of it ? This vast human procession moves 
steadily on, and the instant it passes that low 
portal of death it disappears from our knowledge 
for ever. This fact is one of the great difficulties 
in regard to a future life. True, there has always 
been a vague belief in ghosts, in apparitions of 
the dead, and spiritual manifestations ; but these 
have been so vague as to be rather an alarm than 
an encouragement. Another great difficulty as 
to our continued existence is the dissolution of 
the body. All that we know of human life is in 
connection with body. Life in this world is in- 
evitably bound to body. But death dissolves 
bod}', — how then can life continue ? 

Considering these two facts, (1) that we know 
nothing of the continued existence of those who 
have left us, and (2) that we know of no life 
here except in connection with bod} r , it is not 
at all wonderful that men should have hesitated 
in accepting a future existence. But what is 
wonderful, and very wonderful, is that, in face 
of these two facts, the immense majority of man- 
kind should 3 T et have believed in immortality. 
This faith is a most amazing phenomenon, and is 



BELIEF IN A FUTURE EXISTENCE. 131 

to be accounted for. Am I told that the wish 
is father to the thought? that men believe in a 
future life because they desire a future life? I 
reply that this merely changes the form of the 
wonder. We then ask, Why do men ivish to live 
hereafter, if there is no hereafter? If all they 
know and love is here, why this universal wish for 
a continued existence in some unknown world? 
As Shelley saj's : — 

This earth is the nurse of all we know, 
This earth is the mother of all we feel, 

And the coming of death is a dreadful blow 
To a brain unencompassed by nerves of steel, 

When all that we know, and feel, and see, 

Shall pass, like an unreal mystery ! 

If, in spite of all the reasons for doubt, in spite 
of our ignorance concerning the future world, — 
there is a universal instinct in man to believe in 
such a world, — this instinctive belief is itself a 
proof that we are to live again. Every other 
instinct has its appropriate object. There is an 
instinctive desire for food, and food is provided ; 
an instinctive longing for knowledge, and knowl- 
edge is given ; an instinctive joy in beauty, and 
beauty is shed over the world ; an instinctive 
social tendency, and society is here ; an instinct 



132 BELIEF IN A FUTURE EXISTENCE. 

for construction and art, and the means of exer- 
cising this are given. If, therefore, there is 
planted in man an instinctive longing for im- 
mortality, — universal, constant, permanent, — 
we may be sure that God provides an existence 
to satisfy such a longing. 

As to the difficulty arising from the fact that 
bodily organization is necessary to all life here, — 
we see that, in spite of this, men have usually 
believed in a soul which may exist independently 
of the body. The belief in ghosts, just referred 
to, is evidence of this. A ghost is assumed to be 
a being without a bocly, yet capable of thought, 
action, speech ; capable of being seen, of moving 
to and fro, of continued personal identity. In 
short, it is a soul existent without the bodily 
organization. Now, there either are ghosts, or 
there are no ghosts. If ghosts exist, then evi- 
dently the soul may exist without the body. But 
if there are no ghosts, then mankind has always 
believed it possible for souls to exist without the 
boclv, though they have no proof of it. This, 
therefore, must be an instinctive belief, and, like 
all other instincts, has something in reality corre- 
sponding to it. If, though there have never been 
any ghosts, men have always believed in ghosts, 



BELIEF IN A FUTURE EXISTENCE, 133 

it proves that there is something within us which 
feels itself capable of existing without the body. 
And such a consciousness can hardly be explained 
except hy assuming the reality of such a soul, 
which, using the body but as the means of com- 
municating with this world, is capable of existing 
in some other way hereafter. 

The first reason for believing in immortality is 
that we are made to believe in it. There is no 
better evidence than that a belief accords with 
human nature. But, beside this, is the fact that 
our confidence in immortality increases as we 
have more and higher life. In a low condition 
of our existence, death is the "king of terrors." 
But as man becomes more alive in mind, heart, 
spirit, death loses its sting and the grave its vic- 
tory. This is one way in which Christ has abol- 
ished death, — by making the human soul more 
full of life. This is one way, and his resurrection 
is another. It is a fact, explain it as you will, 
that the disciples of Jesus were emancipated from 
all fear of death. They explained this phenome- 
non by saying that they had not only seen their 
Master alive, after his crucifixion, but also arisen, 
ascended, gone into a ^higher world ; from which, 
nevertheless, he came to encourage them. It is 



134 BELIEF IN A FUTURE EXISTENCE. 

often said that the resurrection of Jesus is the 
great miracle of Christianity. But I believe its 
power consisted in its not being a miracle, but a 
revelation to the disciples of what was to come to 
them all. All were to rise, as Jesus rose. They 
saw that, instead of death being a descent into a 
dark under- world, it was an ascent into a world 
of higher life and larger light. The power of the 
resurrection for the disciples was that it bridged 
the gulf between this life and the next, and 
showed them Jesus gone up to glory, victory, and 
heaven. And the power of Christ's resurrec- 
tion to us is that the faith in a continuance and 
ascent of being has been transmitted in the church 
as a permanent possession, taught us in our in- 
fancy, breathed in with the very air around us, 
and reinforcing the original instinct of immor- 
tality. 

I am not one of those who refuse to the lower 
animals all hope of continued existence. I believe 
it very possible that the living principle in the 
animal may be capable of development into some 
higher modes of existence after the death of the 
body. The reason why immortality is usually 
denied to animals is that their lives seem to be 
complete here. They have, apparently, no unex- 



BELIEF IN A FUTURE EXISTENCE, 135 

hausted capacities. The lower races of men are 
like animals in this, that they also manifest few 
tendencies reaching beyond their present life. 
But, as man's soul is developed by knowledge 
and culture, this surprising phenomenon appears, 
that while his body grows old and decay's his 
mind continues to advance. The bodily life is 
limited to seventy or eighty years, — then it must 
decay, and at last perish. But no such limitation 
applies to the soul. The mind of Michel Angelo 
at sixty-seven accomplished one of his greatest 
works, and at ninety his powers were in full ac- 
tivity. Milton finished and published u The 
Paradise Lost" only a few 3-ears before his death. 
The mists of age ma}' indeed dim the radiance of 
the soul, as clouds collect around the setting sun ; 
but occasional gleams of gioiy show that the 
power is there, though partially hidden. These 
inexhausted and seemingly inexhaustible capaci- 
ties are a sign that we are intended for further 
being. Problems open before the mind which 
the mind is incapable of solving in this world. 
These prophesy some other state where they can 
be comprehended. The undying affection of the 
human heart for the loved and lost reaches be}xmd 
the grave, and assures us of some future reunion. 



136 BELIEF IN A FUTURE EXISTENCE. 

When the reason is unable to prove an immortal- 
ity, the heart asserts it on the evidence of its own 
imperishable love. 

The word i c indenture " came from the old cus- 
tom of cutting a parchment contract into two 
pieces ; divided, not by a straight line, but by a 
jagged one, marked with indentations, each party 
to the contract retaining one piece. If we were 
to see such a parchment, with the lines thus 
abruptly cut asunder, we should infer from their 
incomplete sense that there was somewhere an- 
other piece, which would make the meaning entire 
and intelligible. The mind of man, in this world, 
is such an incomplete parchment. Intellectual 
questions are roused, which cannot be answered. 
Moral difficulties appear, which are left unsettled. 
He has longings and aspirations for a good and 
a beauty which this w r orld cannot supply. He 
sees all around him inequalities and apparent in- 
justice ; the triumph of evil, the defeat of good- 
ness ; bad men in power, patriots in exile, — 

Truth for ever on the scaffold, wrong for ever on the 
throne ; 

the false priest surrounded w T ith admiration, the 
true prophet despised and rejected of men. Of 



BELIEF IN A FUTURE EXISTENCE. 137 

the child of genius, born under inhospitable au- 
spices, how often it must be said that — 

" He came,, and baring his heaven-bright thought, 
He earned the base world's ban; 
And, having vainly lived and taught, 
Gave place to a meaner man." 

If this life were the whole, all such inequalities 
and discords would be inexplicable. In all ages, 
therefore, the conscience of man, no less than his 
reason and his heart, has predicted a future state, 
where the wrong should be made right, the tri- 
umphant falsehood exposed, injured innocence be 
vindicated, and the righteous judgments of God 
made known. The conscience does not so much 
demand retribution on the wrong-doer as vindica- 
tion of justice and right. It predicts a revelation 
of truth and the exposure of lies. 

I have seen a little infant die, — one just come 
into the world. As jet it had developed no char- 
acter ; it had no conscious intelligence ; it was 
nothing but a promise, — an expectation. But 
that promise, that faint prophecy of a coming 
future, had so taken hold of its mother's heart that 
the loss of her infant nearly drove her to despair. 
But that infant was God's child too ; more the 
child of God than of its earthly parent, for God 



138 BELIEF IN A FUTURE EXISTENCE, 

himself had sent this bud of hope into the world. 
And shall the heart of the earthly father and 
mother cling thus to their darling, and the heart 
of the heavenly Father let it go for ever into 
emptiness and annihilation? Shall we, who have 
so little power over its destiny, struggle and cry 
and pray, and use all means to save it, and he 
who holds it in the hollow of his hand let it slip 
into an abyss of destruction ? No ! this yearning 
of ours for our loved ones is only a faint, far-off 
shadow of that Infinite love which envelops them 
and us, now and for ever. 

I know very well what materialism replies to all 
this. It tells me that life, thought, love, are mere 
results of organization ; that, when the organiza- 
tion perishes, these of necessity go too. A drop 
of blood in the human brain will put an end to 
the aspiration of the saint ; the lesion of a nerve 
destroy the courage of a hero. The poet's eye, 
rolling in a fine frenzy, turns from heaven to earth, 
from earth to heaven. He is on the point of cre- 
ating a Hamlet or the Iliad : a little congestion 
of serous fluid arrests the conception, and it is 
gone for ever. True. The body, while we live in 
it, is the indispensable condition of our activity. 
But it does not follow that we are the result of the 



BELIEF IN A FUTURE EXISTENCE. 139 

body. Rafaelle, while painting the Dresden Ma- 
donna, might have been stopped by some trilling 
defect in his brushes, or his oils, or his canvas. 
But that does not prove that Rafaelle himself was 
the result of his implements. The body is the 
organization which, in this world, the soul uses, — 
without it, it is helpless. But that does not prove 
that the soul is the result of its organization. 

I have seen, in this city, great crowds collect to 
follow^ the body of some eminent person to the 
grave. So it was when John Andrew died, so 
when Charles Sumner died. The sense of a great 
loss fell upon the city. Business ceased ; the 
hurry of life was, for one hour, suspended. The 
whole community stood around these remains, 
once inhabited b}^ a patriotic soul. And shall 
we, creatures of a day, thus mourn the loss of 
our human brother, — and shall the Infinite Love 
dismiss him into the night and void of annihi- 
lation ? 

One of the last great discoveries of science is 
that of the conservation of force. So economical 
is nature that she never lets go one atom of mat- 
ter, one molecule of organized being, or one unit 
of power. All is changed, nothing is lost in the 
creation. But here is a soul, the greatest force 



140 BELIEF IN A FUTURE EXISTENCE. 

of all, the fine result of a long series of develop- 
ments ; a soul capable of thought, of love, of 
intellectual creation. It is the soul of Newton, 
able to read the laws of the universe ; the soul of 
Fenelon, reaching a height of disinterested love 
w T hich makes it like the seraph near God's throne ; 
the soul of Homer, whose song fills the world with 
music during twenty- five centuries. And do 3'ou 
tell me that, while not a particle of carbon or 
hydrogen can escape the omnipotent conservatism 
of the Almighty, he will allow such powers as 
these to be resolved back into nothing? With 
the religious man, this argument is all-sufficient. 
When we come to see God as a father and friend, 
death is abolished. We know that we can trust 
him with our life, and the lives of those dear to us, 
always. Therefore, the early Christians, hiding 
from the rage of their persecutors in the dark 
caves beneath imperial Rome, laid their dead 
away, and wrote over them inscriptions full of 
hope, love, and joy : " My dear Caius sleeps here." 
44 Rest in peace, my Theodora." This same trust 
has come down through all the intervening ages, 
and is ours to-day. Now, as always, faith 
overcomes death, and wins the victory from the 
grave. 



BELIEF IN A FUTURE EXISTENCE. 141 

The greatest impulse yet given to belief in im- 
mortality has come from the divine trust of Jesus 
in God as the Universal Father, — the Father of 
the evil as well as of the good, — whose sun shines 
and whose rain falls on the grateful and on the 
unthankful. This relation of the father to the 
child is a tie which death may not sever. It goes 
below all distinction of character, of capacity, of 
worth. The father and mother do not love their 
child because it is full of power and promise, full 
of affection and goodness, but because it is their 
child. The pity of their hearts accumulates the 
more around the weakest, the least attractive of 
their children ; the poor thing born with an irrita- 
ble temper, a weak purpose, or some inherited 
tendency to evil. And when the feeble infant, 
worn out with disease, at last lies in its little 
grave, the parents' love goes with it still. Long 
years after, that undying love holds the lost child 
in fadeless memory. If, then, these poor hearts 
of ours cannot forget our children, does the Infi- 
nite Heart of the universe cease to remember 
them ? If we do not love them less because of 
their weaknesses and incapacity, how much more 
shall the Father of their spirits look down on 
them with inexhaustible love. Say not that his 



142 BELIEF IN A FUTURE EXISTENCE. 

infinite tenderness can be exhausted by their sin, 
when ours, so much poorer, does not grow faint 
nor weary. If we must forgive our brother, not 
seven times, but seventy times seven, when shall 
an Infinite rnercy grow unrelenting and implaca- 
ble ? Our reason and conscience are disturbed by 
incompleteness and discord in this little world : 
shall the Perfect Reason permit an everlasting 
discord, an eternal hell of sin and miseiy to con- 
tinue, unconquered b}^his love, unredeemed by his 
gospel, for ever? Jesus himself has taught us 
this mode of reasoning, by analogy, from the poor 
love of earthly parents to the vaster tenderness 
of the heavenly Father. The only argument Jesus 
ever used against the Sadducees in defence of 
immortality is founded on this high conception 
of the fatherly character of God. If he calls 
himself the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, 
then they must live ; for whatever belongs to him 
cannot die. If he is not willing that any should 
perish, then no one can perish. Evil must be 
overcome at last by good ; death must be swal- 
lowed up in life. Thus alone can God become 
all in all, the sovereign of the universe. Finite 
evil, if it ends in infinite good, ceases to be evil ; 
for the finite, compared with the infinite, is noth- 



BELIEF IN A FUTURE EXISTENCE. 143 

ing. But, if finite evil ends in eternal evil, then 
evil reigns by the side of good, sharing the uni- 
verse ; and God can never be the All-in- All. But 
Jesus and Paul have taught us that all men are to 
be drawn to Christ, and all are to be made alive 
in him. When this final consummation arrives, 
then all doubts will be answered, difficulties ex- 
plained, problems solved, and partial evil be seen 
as universal good. 

And now, if you ask, " What do we know 
about the other life?" we must reply that we 
know very little about it. It is evident that we 
are not intended to know much. Perhaps it 
would take our thoughts too far away from our 
duties here. This is our sphere while we remain 
in it. If we were able to look into the great 
world be^'ond, we might repine at being obliged 
to remain in this so long. Just as God has 
placed great gulfs of space between the planets, 
so that the inhabitants of each shall only know 
the affairs of its own globe, he has placed a gulf 
between this world and the future life. Thus, 
he makes it our duty to think, not of dying, but 
of living ; not of the hereafter, but of the here ; 
not of the world to come, but of the world that is. 
Every day we are to prepare, not for death, but 



144 BELIEF IN A FUTURE EXISTENCE. 

for life ; for, if we live well and wisely here, we 
may certainly trust God as to our hereafter. 

This, however, I think we may say, that death, 
when it comes, must be considered not a bad 
thing, but a good thing. Since the Almighty 
sends death to every one of his creatures to whom 
he has given life, since death is as universal as 
life, death must be a blessing as well as life. It 
is a part of the same scheme, it is a step forward, 
only another phase of living. Some great advan- 
tage must be connected with this event which we 
call death. It is made fearful when we look for- 
ward to it from a distance, that we may not too 
rashly seek it, before we have had enough of the 
discipline of this world. But when it comes it 
usually is welcome ; and it may be that, when we 
look back upon it from the other world, we shall 
smile to think that we should ever have been 
afraid of it. 

This also we know of the other world : That it 
is created by the same Being who has made this 
w r orld ; it is another mansion in the house of our 
Father. Consider, then, what he has done for us 
here, if } r ou wish to know what he will do for us 
there. If there is infinite variety in this world, — 
day and night, sleep and waking, changing sea- 



BELIEF IN A FUTURE EXISTENCE. 145 

sons, flowers and trees, lakes and rivers, moun- 
tains and plains, — a vast flora and fauna, — then 
there will, no doubt, be an equal or a greater 
variety there ; for surety the Creator has not ex- 
hausted himself in making this world. T^ere, as 
here, there will be beauty for the eye and ear ; 
problems for the intellect to investigate ; work to 
do, full of utility ; society, intercourse, affection ; 
the power of progress, the sight of goodness and 
greatness above us to aspire to and reverence. 
There will be enough to know, enough to do, and 
enough to love. Perhaps we shall enter more 
into the interior life of nature, understand more 
of its mysteries, and come nearer to the working 
of the creative power whose plastic force flows 
through all things. 

The conception of heaven which has prevailed, 
as a paradise of delight, a garden of all enjoy- 
ments, is not likely to be realized. Such a 
heaven as this would soon become tiresome. 
Passive enjoyment is not what God intends for 
us. He educates us here b} r stern necessity- to 
toil ; he teaches us caution, prudence, industry, 
b}' a sharp discipline ; and it is probable that 
something of this kind of education may be con- 
tinued hereafter. One of the great blessings of 

10 



146 BELIEF IN A FUTURE EXISTENCE. 

this present life is the sense of progress, of im- 
provement. And as we are told that "hope 
abides," as well as faith and love, there will be 
always before us some new vision of beauty, truth, 
and love to which to aspire. There, as here, 
heaven will greatly consist in forgetting the things 
behind and reaching out to those that are be- 
fore ; in perpetual ascent toward the Great Source 
of all being. There is only one place in the 
New Testament where any thing is told us con- 
cerning the mode of existence hereafter, and that 
is by Paul in his chapter on the resurrection. In 
that wonderful passage, where he seems to pass 
the flaming bounds of space and time ; after assur- 
ing us that redemption will be coextensive with 
sin, he goes on to describe the end, when Jesus, 
having subdued all evil, shall give up the kingdom 
to the Father, to whom he himself shall be subject 
and subordinate. He lifts, for a moment, the 
corner of the veil which hangs between this life 
and the next, and allows us a glimpse into those 
diviner mansions of our Father's great building, 
the universe. He goes on to unfold what was 
before secret, and thus virtually gives us a new 
revelation in regard to the future life. There will 
be bodies, he says, there as here, only of a higher 



BELIEF IN A FUTURE EXISTENCE. 147 

kind than these, — more spiritual, more powerful, 
more glorious, incorruptible. Those bodies will 
possess faculties to us now unknown. They will 
furnish means to the soul of much keener penetra- 
tion into nature, fuller communication with other 
minds, and far nobler intercourse with the angelic 
societies. And this is what we might expect. 
All is progress here. Every year brings us some 
new invention. We can now converse with friends 
across the Atlantic, call on the sun to paint por- 
traits and landscapes, and with a little prism of 
glass find out the chemistry of the sun and the 
stars. A few years ago all this would be regarded 
as an impossibility or as a miracle. In a future 
life, we imxj expect to find far greater manifesta- 
tions of the power of the advancing soul to use 
the laws of the universe for its ends, and to pene- 
trate mysteries of being stranger than an} T thing 
hitherto known. The great law of all existence 
is progress, — progress accelerated as we ascend 
nearer to God. Knowledge shall pass away, 
resolved into higher knowledge. Earthly inter- 
ests, which now seem so vast, will by and by 
appear as the toys of childhood. We shall look 
back from a higher world on our present civiliza- 
tion, and on our present Christianity, as we now 



148 BELIEF IN A FUTURE EXISTENCE. 

look back on the monstrous strife and perturba- 
tion of past geologic ages. We may seem to our- 
selves hereafter as the Saurians and Trilobites 
seem to us now. But through all change, within 
all progress, something will for ever abide. Faith 
will abide. We shall carry with us into all 
worlds the same essential trust in the Infinite love 
which sustains us now. Hope will abide. For, 
whatever heights of being we may ascend, what- 
ever depths of experience we may explore, there 
will ever open before us new vistas of knowledge, 
activity, and joy. And love will abide, — the same, 
but better. Love, uniting us with God and all 
his creatures, lifting us into communion with all 
goodness in all worlds ; love making us, and 
keeping us, at one with God for ever and for ever. 

" And so, beside the silent sea, 
I wait the muffled oar ; 
No harm from him can come to me, 
On ocean or on shore." 



Cambridge : Press of John Wilson & Son. 




90 



